 Okay, and we are in the right place. Yes. So I suggest you give it a couple of minutes for people to join. Okay, let's just wait then one minute. It's probably easier to respond. We're still trying to configure things here. Thank you for joining us. We have this thing called the album, which is a type of device that's wrong. And the idea is that we capture the voice so can move into the perspective of the person. So we'll wait for one minute and then I'll get all the news and we want to call them. Just say if there's any problem with the sound come from the room just someone, you know, from the panelist just please let us know. Okay, so should I get started. Okay, well, hello everyone and welcome to the first workshop of the project. I'm just going to say hello to those who are known as yours and now one of the four computers project. I'm teaching modern European history as in the rest of London and I'm just in research fellow at the center of the studies here at case here. Thank you for joining us today in person and those of your time and having environment so not always great, but these two days will try to make our best to make the most of it and reach the benefit of the online environment and encourage the participation of those who are partners and also those in the audience. So I'm going to introduce the idea behind the project and explain briefly the format, and then say, I want to thank you to various colleagues who made this happen. Before handing over to one of us team and Joe Mayor to continue and start a conversation. The opinions and bison videos are moments of commemoration and reflection that say much about the past, as about the present. And for those like me interested among other things and what the great history and politics 2021 and 2022 over land my anniversary events that have shaped more than we can. And one like that, not only. Thank you. Thank you. One witness that I sent in a solution, you don't need a length and complicated process that succeeded in delivering the first independent states in the fringes of post Napoleonic Europe. This year Maxis and Henry of the destruction of the Greek Orthodox communities in Asia minor, following the defeat of the economy. Both occasions are opportune moments to rethink reasons placed in the background of an ever expanding the national system, but they're also more than that. And this takes me to the idea for this workshop. The failure of the Greek expansionist project mandatory became the success of the next national transformation of the ultimate. In 1922 events increase in Turkey therefore has a binary dynamic, a lament for the destruction of the lost home and Greece victory day celebrations in Turkey. The Greek 30s 1922 is a story of trauma and triumph war and violence. It's a story of displacement and population transfers that heralded the consolidation of the national state and got the booted the pursuit of national homogeneity to the mainstream in the national politics. The nether side of self determination to remember every fight. And it's also a story of what making and more breaking in the shadow of empire. And it's now various research process applications have said life on key aspects of the political, cultural and international history of the group that is currently in their 20s. Some of the most widely discussed themes concern the recovery of refugee experience and memory, as well as the analysis of the legal cultural and bio political logic under being the making and I'm making my knowledge of relations in both sides of the country. What seems to have been missing in this effort to systematically place the critical story in the wider country is rather an effort to systematically place the critical story in a wider context of the view of transitions and transformations across Europe, East and West, and the mirror in the least. And from this purpose point, nationalism and empire can be seen as far from I think most political organization. By, by purposefully shedding light 1922, a moment of transition in between the national conferences, among other things, Paris 1919, San Remo 1920, Belgrade 1920, Genoa 1922, Los Angeles 1933. This project, you know, once you kind of pause and makes us we think certain key dynamics, if we were to travel back in time exactly 100 years ago and actually did this experiment. Yes, what will be read in the pages of the master guide. You know, I don't know if you have stated it, but we read in the master guide and right 100 years ago, 28 April. It would encounter actually photograph of the Russian delegation, a general caption, and that's the two caption, what the Russians look like. Now I wonder how did the Russian look then the Russians look then for the British leadership of the Guardian, and how they look now, but that's probably a matter for another workshop, but I just want to throw it in because it's quite interesting. Put our minds back in 1922. In the spring of 1922, it was not Paris, but the Italian port of Genoa, as Carol Pink reminded us and others that became this from Carol Pink's words, a work capital invaded Genoa by statesmen, journalists, businessmen and spies, anticipating a major break. That was general 1922. A few months later, Rome will become decided another bleaker. Now, Lloyd George, since we're reading Lloyd George's assessment of Genoa seem to capture the moment. That's a quote from George as I suppose it's casual. That's anything about 1919. So Lloyd George grows from the volume down to the black sea. There is hardly a line, which is not contested. Each of those lines involved in setting the possibility of a day of conflict in Europe. So that's how Lloyd George seen and understood Europe in a wider context in the spring. Now our project, the Global 1922 project ventures to place the story alongside the wider network of connected developments in places like Ireland, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Russia, and Syria, and on other sites. Our aspiration is to put our mind pretty sure as people don't know that is to push back against the temptations of methodological nationality. And they facilitate the medications of various studies and offer a connective and comparative account of key themes, necessarily imperial nationalist and internationalist imaginaries of a disrupted world in flux. And these themes are globally kind, locally nature sometimes revolve around a contested policy of humanitarian, the shifting nature of warfare and risk making, the language of liberty, self determination, Westernization. They include stories of economic integration, tales of forced migration to pick from some of the many things that will occupy these two days. And our exploration, like any exploration of this kind, is far from complex, but I believe it's a good enough starting point to kick off a productive conversation on the global dynamics of the early 1920s. And that was a bit about how to explain, you know, why I decided for this project and invited you here. And I just wanted to end with a few words about the format of our proceedings. Something is an animal. Each speaker panelist has around 15 minutes to flesh out their key argument. And each panel has a commentator who will also chair the session and moderate the discussion. And the setup of our platform allows for direct interventions from the federal presenters and strongly encourage the rest of you attending the workshop online in the webinar format to send us your questions from the Q&A function. And I should also stress that these are works in progress. So they're purposely incomplete because what we want to do is start a discussion. I'm going to go over to the director of the Center for Electrical Studies. I just wish to extend a note of thanks to those who work hard to make this happen and to our sponsors. So the event is hosted by the Center for Electrical Studies and the Sir Michael Howard Center for Electrical Studies. We are happy to have the Center for Modern History at Binding University and the Center for more studies of the industry called Stambe as international partners. We're also grateful to the Modern Geographic Association, the Events Foundation, and last but not least the Plaster President Society for their support. And finally, last but not least truly, special thanks to Ailey Vigno, Peter Swanno, who's on here, and Oli Michael Dyer for their generous assistance in making this event happen, so that it would be possible for us to have this conversation. So, you don't need to, you can just, yeah. Sorry. My name is Honda Bernstein, and I'm the Courage Chair in the Center for Hellenic Studies. It's a pleasure to be part of this collaboration. It's really wonderful for the Center for Hellenic Studies to engage in a collaboration with more studies on our very own campus and the School of Security Studies and to find that collaboration in this particular topic. So I'm really grateful to be able to do this on campus with some of you, and with more of you online. And of course, there will be a continuation to this effort with our Greek and other partners. The Center for Hellenic Studies that last year focused so much on the bicentennial of the Greek Revolution to dial forward by a hundred year to another much darker topic of anniversary, commemoration rather, in the centenary of 1922 is a very healthy exercise, when again we push it to the global dimensions of that topic. I'm especially grateful to George Jarekopoulos for doing the heavy lifting on this, on the globalization on this topic, and for putting me in charge of a panel on Ireland and Spain, pushing my boundaries far outside the usual norm as well. George gave us around already the most eloquent introduction, little to add, but I also want to add that we will be focusing, as much as we focus on military, the political, the diplomatic dimensions that 1922 and its anniversary pose really important questions in terms of humanitarian and cultural economic dimensions, vulnerabilities, and how real these topics and their ripple effects, and presumed not neutralities and redefinitions of neutralities, how real and current those sound today. So that will be a dimension that will ring true in very many of our topics as well. As much as we think of 1922 as a moment, or even a movement, and for the Greeks again we would have shift that in September of 1922, it's important that we rethink it, and think of this era as not as a moment of 10 years long. There's a very much along the way to this phenomenon that we will be studying, and of which we still saw the percussions today. 1912 is equally important for the part of the world that we have been involved in, and I'm particularly keen on having Michael Levin Smith present here with a specialist on the topic. So yes, a lot to do here to extend geographical boundaries with us to really stretch chronological frameworks, and then with a thank you to all our partners, and all our participants are handed over to my colleague Joe Milo. I think the outlook will do its thing. Well I'm Professor Joe Milo, Professor of International History and Technical Studies, and Director of the Sir Michael Howard Center for the Study of the War, and we're very grateful to, again partners with all the institutions mentioned, and I reiterate our thanks to George for all the heavy lifting on making the project happen. Ellie is in the background here. We have wonderful staff in the Department of War Studies who contribute to the Sir Michael Howard Center. Frankly, nothing would happen without that. And again, I just want to underscore that we are really delighted to have across faculty, across department, cooperation on the Center for the Next Studies. I will just now dive into the first panel and introduce our two distinguished speakers. And just a reminder, if you have any questions for the audience, you can insert your questions into the question and answer function on Zoom, and just type them in, and we'll get to them in due course. Let me introduce two speakers, Professor Laura Robinson. I'm changing your name here as I go along. You may use Jay Summer. I'm going to introduce Professor Penn State University and author of many books that I'm just going to highlight colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, University of Texas 2011, Modern Separation, Transfer Partition, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, and the politics of mass violence in the Middle East, which is the most recent book, Oxford 2020. And I understand you're just beginning a new project on something fascinating called the Projects on Roosevelt's FDR's M project, which is something I had heard of this, and I guess wartime plans to build a legitimate empty space that's undesirable for future populations. Let me now turn to Professor Jay Winter, a Meredith University who, well, I think it says here you've published 25 books, I will be the one. So instead of what I'm going to do is highlight what is going to be your most recent book for your next book of great events, the data great work ended, which focuses on those and you're going to be speaking on that theme today. So each getting about 15 minutes and the turn to the door first. Thank you so much for that great introduction, and I'm so happy to be here. It's a pleasure to say hello to the organizers for putting together such a workshop and conversation, and I'm really honored to be here. So I'm going to talk today about a couple of different sort of big topics having to do with several of the treaties, but that never even mentioned here. And I've called my time refugees in the point of our production of territorial integrity. And it has a couple of different components and I want to emphasize the preliminary and original nature of what I'm about to say. And, and that I'm sort of exploring some links that I think are there that have not been fully articulated in literature. So there are kind of two pieces to what I want to talk about today. The first is this concept of territorial integrity, which comes up many times in the context of all of these treaties are virtually all of them, and is also of course part of Wilson's concept for this order. And is a foundational concept in the kind of political settlements. So, there are some peculiarities though with this notion of territorial integrity that kind of in the first instance seems like a natural output of the sorts of conversations going on from their side forward. And that is that, even though territorial integrity, which Wilson said was so important to me about, I'll quote him very briefly, the political independence and territorial integrity of Greek and small state states alike was so central that it had to be protected by some sort of organization. This is simultaneously, it seems to me a basic principle of peace treaties, and also not something that we see enforced very. On the one hand, we have this political commitment this dispersive commitment to the idea of the establishment of borders, and of territoriality, particularly for the emerging new states of Eastern Europe and Middle East. And on the other hand, we have an equal commitment to zones, economic zones of free trade, which are sometimes embedded in the very same documents that we see this commitment to territorial integrity being outlined. So, one of the things that happens in this kind of post war order is that we have the necessity to demonstrate territorial integrity as a political principle of this post war era, while also not disrupting these much more regionally to an imperial essentially economic relationships trade zones and political alliances. So, this is something that we can see as an historian of the Middle East I'll bring in the mandatory system of fairly immediately. So, one thing we can see very clearly in the documents for the mandatory, the mandatory texts that come up in from 1920 onwards, because these are documents that simultaneously in the same space, highlight borders highlight the need for territorial integrity and also include substantial provisions for the enforcement, mainly against the will of local actors of imperial zones of free trade. So, these are documents where we can already see the tensions coming up between these two principles of this post war post war order. So, I want to think a little bit about this concept of territorial integrity, what it means in the absence of these kinds of economic frames the ways that it pushes up against these economic frames, what it's for then, and who is responsible for enforcing and just right. And one of the things that it seems to me that we can see in this period is that as territorial integrity and new orders and new states emerges a principle. People who are most directly charged with demonstrating it are refugees on the one hand and quote unquote minorities on the other. Right. And I want to explore this particularly with regards to the Middle East and suggest two things. And one is that those populations are charged with the enforcement of so called territorial integrity precisely because they can act as enforcers of these two national entities without disrupting the economic relationships that are simultaneously emerging right that they have no they're not directly involved enough in the economies and local economies of these places to act as disruptors to the economic relationships that have been constructed. And then second, I want to point out that, while in the main refugee historians have thought about this period is one of migration and mobility that in point of fact, particularly with the X Ottoman territories, that when we look at refugees they are mostly immobilized right that this is this is a period of the settlement enforced settlement of refugees, and to some degree that column that that's true for the one of minorities as well. So, you'll see that this is this is something that goes in a number of different directions, but I want to kind of explore the relationship between the emergence of this concept of national territorial integrity, the economic practicalities on the ground and the ways in which refugee and minority policy and literally settlement policy and forced settlement policy is designed to bridge the gap between the discursive effort towards territorial integrity and the practical effort on the other hand of economic free trade that will benefit the empires. So, I want to take up a huge amount more time that I want to just suggest some of the examples that we have here. I'm going to focus my comments here on refugees and minorities in the Middle East in their book we call the Middle East in the media after that of the war. So, as you know, as I said we think about refugees as kind of being marked by the, my ability right the definition of refugee is someone who has been displaced has been moved right, and it is true of course that people are displaced that people are moved around even after they've been displaced we have examples of communities that are placed multiple times in the course of the years following before, but refugee policy as it emerged in the aftermath, particularly in the aftermath of Lausanne, as, as George has already suggested, had to do with settling people, right in the name. So we see this in the Greek Turkish the so called population exchange, which is a euphemistic way of putting it, but nevertheless the language that we have. But this also happens in the mandatory states right, so to give just one example. French mandatory Syria in the aftermath of the war had something like probably a hundred thousand army and refugees who were survivors of the genocide. And as had been moved into camps, kind of from 1916 17 forward in and around Aleppo and Latakia, in particular some in Damascus, some in Beirut. And so, one of the things that happened to them was that there was concerted efforts in French mandatory Syria, not to allow them to be right, and this is something that is explicit in French policy and I believe itself in mandatory So, and it takes a couple of different forms. One is the enforcement of settlement in particular delineated Armenian neighborhoods in places like Aleppo. That was simultaneously financed by the French mandatory government that will be by refugees themselves, who often had to pay back loans that they were given in order to construct their their housing. And then we also so we have this kind of construction of these delineated neighborhoods that are intended to keep people in place to maintain the community as an Armenian community that could be identified as a full meal collaborator. And to ensure that onward migration did not take place. Right. And so we have quotes from people like the commissioner for Syria. This is who says things like, you know, we cannot allow these as soon as these people get a little bit of money together they will want to move on. We cannot allow this to happen. Right. So, refugees are being used here to delineate borders to demonstrate the new state of Syria under French colonial authority. They're also used as military, right, which is an important point that comes up. And at the same time, they are particularly placed in border zones like in the Gisera, where they will not interfere with what is actually a very loosely enforced border situation. Right. And so they are demonstrating French control, but they are not interfering with what is until the 1930s, the zone of retreat. Something similar happens in Iraq, where a Syrian refugee communities were moved into Iraq and made citizens with as part of an effort to delineate British and Iraqi territorial control, which was being planned by Turkey at the same moment. So here again, many of these refugees actually want to move on to emigrate France to the United States to the Iraq, all of which are spaces that have already considerable Armenian and Syrian refugees. And this is, this is considered to be antithetical to the demonstration of these new states territory integrity and the imposition of colonial rule in practice. So, I think that there are a couple of that there are some things that we can explore here. I'll finish just by saying there are some things we can explore, not just in terms of how refugees construct a national system that is marked by defensible identifiable borders, right, which is something that is part of Wilson's family in home your vision for the first quarter, right. But also that they must do so through immobilization, right, not through migration but immobilization that they need to be made to stay, and that they do so in that the reason that refugees are so valuable to this effort is because they can demonstrate borders without interfering with the economic structures that are emerging at the same time. And I'll close by saying that I think we have perhaps underestimated as historians the ways in which this effort includes the Soviet spirit, the emerging Soviet spirit, right, where the idea of territorial integrity and refugees use in producing and demonstrating territorial integrity is something that also comes up. And that the Janssen offices efforts to place permanently to immobilize Armenian refugees in the in the new Soviet Armenia is a substantial important and underexplored aspect of both the imposition of territorial integrity, such as it is in across the world during this period, and the emergence of a refugee policy that is intent on placing people somewhere and then making sure they don't leave them. So I will close there. It's kind of collection of ideas. Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation and the chance to live the experience of historical discussion. My title of my paper could have been Putin's world. Unfortunately, I think there is a linkage linkage. I'm just going to the first world war is around the question as the experience and character of war changes so does the experience and character piece. The point I want to make is that the brutality and criminality of the regime is in line with a series of changes that can be dated back to the first world war before different parts of the world. And that phenomenon I call the civilization of war. There is an interesting collection of papers by Andrew Barrows and one Thomas overwhelmingly tilted towards the 1945 and after period. What I want to do is to push back to the first world war. And what I want to also to capture is the shift from wars directed against enemy armies by centralized commander towards with or without command centers that primarily target civilians. I would argue that in fundamental ways, the disorder of the first world war the chaos of the first world war was exacerbated aggravated deepened by the even greater chaos of the post 1918 period 1918 to 1922. Protecting people who do not take part in fighting was the explicit purpose of the Geneva conventions. Red Cross and the Corpus of International Humanitarian Law, which was substantial already in 1914 that protection I believe broke down during the first world war. Witness German atrocities in Belgium and northern France in 1914, the Armenian genocide in the following year, as well as the naval blockade of the central powers that aimed at starving civilians into pressuring the government into surrender. Witness to the egregious treatment of colonial civilians and wartime both before and during the first world war. Still, in 1914 18 the primary focus of war was on mass armies, whose fate determined the outcome of the war boundary between civilian military targets have been eroded by 1918. I want to argue that in the five violent years and follow that distinction was a race. The violence against civilians in Europe and beyond became the norm, and how to distinguish between arm bands under a recognizable authority and criminal bands was anybody's guess. Anyone trying to survey what's happening in Ukraine today sees on both sides, what I would call a spectrum of military action by a spectrum of groups loosely ranged under under some military leadership. In addition, the treatment of prisoners of war from Finland to Turkey became murderous in a way almost unknown during the war. More fans died as prisoners of war in caps than in combat. This is a precedent, I believe, which occurred in particular, I just want to cite one in Francesco Franco's regime, which continued killing the Republicans on a mass scale, after the so called end of the Spanish Civil War 1939. Preston's argument that the Spanish Holocaust is about the post war killings of prisoners and indeed the civilians who weren't in the decentering of war created conditions necessitating the requisition of supplies. In the field, this meant it's preparation, robbing killing, maiming, raping, beating peasants and villages, destroying their homes, seizing their animals, theft on a grand scale, but it also entail the use of hunger as a way of asserting the authority of an insurgent group and that's happening in Ukraine as we speak. Finding stability was almost impossible under conditions of economic chaos, chaos and epidemic disease. Farmers pushed off their land during the Balkan Wars in 1912-13, they have returned, but when fighting started again during the war, 1917, they fled, leaving an archipelago of stagnant pools of water, spawning the worst malaria epidemic in European history. We were privileged to discuss at Salonica a few years ago under the championship of Sir Michael at the Balkans War. Color, dysentery, even play, bubonic play returned parts of war-torn Europe to an almost medieval, I would say, early modern status of chaos. Part two, we must add, by the lingering ravages of the worst influenza pandemic in history to date, I won't compare COVID, I'll be back to you. Now the question is, why did this dissenter, series of dissented wars come to an end? This is part of Laura's point. The first reason is the restoration of economic stability, which was the purpose of the USSR. Everyone thinks it was primarily political, but it wasn't perfectly right for them. The economic convention isn't that it was, especially those impoverished British and French by the war. The inflationary spiral of 1918-23 had a recovery almost impossible in the European continent, and it took a multinational effort with the League in believe, I would say, to stabilize both the German and other currencies. Secondly, the Western powers finally recognized and also the regime. We should see that with Lenin's death in 1924, it seemed to be the case that it was that the revolutionary danger had subsided. Thirdly, what I would call the most important and unrecognized elements of the history of this decade of 1922 is that 1922 was a year of sheer exhaustion. The blast of the end, we can't go any further, which diminished the capacity of warring groups to carry on the struggle even if they wanted to. By 1924, Europe had become once again a continent of legitimate nation states, Laura's point, but the stability of those states was compromised by the ravages of interstate wars as well as by conflicts among a wide array of warring groups that were regularly targeting non-communist. And here I'm not even going into the Russian Civil War, what I would call the savagery of class war in the attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and stabilize it there. What happened in Anatolia between 1919 and 22 was over a war between armies and a war against innocent villagers. And then a huge arc of violence extending from Helsinki to Baku, the civilization of war left enduring traces on the last peace treaty signed out of Lausanne in 1923, which began in 22. Now the last upsurge of violence, the Greek-Turkish War of 1922, came to an end at that conference. To defeat the Greek forces in Anatolia, everyone agreed peace had to happen. The termination of hostilities was the purpose of the treaty of Lausanne. The ambiguity is which hostilities. And ultimately it was the 1914 hostilities which trumped the 1919 war. Again, I think three economic reasons for that. Today I just want to tell you one element in the story that stopped. This is the story of the adoption of section six of the treaty, the convention respecting the exchange of Greek-Turkish populations of protocol, signed on the 31st of January 1923. This convention, in my view, is the signature of the civilianization of war. The full treaty of Lausanne set is one of the conditions of peace, the unmixing of populations. Again, it would be interesting to explore the way in which the term unmixing actually has different inflections of different languages. What it is in Norwegian I really would like to know. Different kinds of fish, different kinds of Norwegian access. Lausanne used it. He was the man who took it under his wing as the league's high commissioner on refugees in his written and oral presentations to the peace conference on the 1st of December 1922. Today, we use a sanitary metaphor for the forced expulsion of peoples. The term is ethnic cleansing, which I think is a Russian term that was invented in the 60s, but if anyone knows better, I'm very happy to change that view. As if the removal of people of a particular origin, ethnicity, or race from a mixed community rends it pure, healthier, less susceptible to friction and conflict, ethnic cleansing. Dirt is anthropologists married of, let's put it, is matter out of place. Unmixing or ethnic cleansing is the removal of people out of place. What made the new language of expulsion particularly striking was that in Lausanne, nationality or what we now term ethnicity, maybe using other words too, was defined that solely by religion, not by language customs of personal choice. And Christians, not Muslims, Turks meant Muslims, not Christians. For the time of the Treaty of Rosanna with certain exceptions, we orthodox Christians living in Anatolia, as they had done for centuries were out of place in the new Turkey. The last painful spasm of exchange of population in the 1st century. Now what this unmixing, what made this unmixing particularly brutal was that it was not voluntary as possible. That was its author's belief and I think there were many authors to the population. Everyone ducks, but they all have, I think, mud on their redder. The compulsory characters, it was done quickly enough sufficiently quickly to save lives. By the way, I think it'd be interesting to hear what Laura thinks about this, because it's the only time I know of where you don't bring food to refugees, you bring refugees to food. You provide them with a rural alignment where they can be safe and stable and not move around. It seems a very strange shift from 19th century humanitarian law that I hope David de Vergonia can lead us into this area later on. Now, yes, we all know in 1913 reasonable area exchange populations. This was a recognition of the time-honored tendency of civilians to flee conflict zones voluntarily. Millions did so over in many parts of Europe between 1914 and 18, but after the war, civilians were trapped in areas in which fighting occurred and during which non-covidence were targeted overwhelmingly non-covidence were targeted. In 1923 and for the first time to end this kind of war, population exchange became compulsory. The civilianization of warm men, that civilian ethnic cleansing became an integral and even essential part of peace of us. My last one, simply this, civilians were hostages exchanged in the interest of peace. And I think they are in crime today. In that steel factory there are civilians in front of the soldiers who will be exchanged, will be used by both sides cruely, brutally. And my claim is that the first instance in history where the end of war was not the moment of the exchange of prisoners of war as classic, but the end of war is an exchange of civilians. When I use the term the civilianization of war, it's to mark that extraordinary treatment of civilian populations as the integral element that made the treaty agreement possible. It's on the 30th of January, Mustafa Ismet knew very well he was going home. His brilliant strategy, and of course it goes on, is to stall. To stall until the allies got fed up because none of them wanted to go to war. None of them was prepared to go to war. None of them could afford to go to war. So he knew that on the 4th of February he'd be out the door and sell the curves on it. So 30th of January is the assurance, remind you by signing that agreement, is the assurance that there would be a peace treaty. Not now, but later and probably better for all concerned until various people disappear curves on more jokes among them. My final point is simply this 1922 it seems to me is extraordinary moments in the transformation of the institutions of war and peace in Europe, which remain with us to this day. And that it's absolutely impossible to understand what Putin is doing in Ukraine without seeing him as the successor goes out. Thank you very much. Two wonderful papers I think I've just observed by Congress to draw on some themes, and perhaps that's some questions along the way, and then we'll turn it over to questions in the room. And again, just to reiterate, if you're online, please use the question and answer function. And then we'll turn it over to questions and pose them to our panelists. And sorry and online panelists as well, of course, sorry. So, so what strikes me that nice these two papers and George mentioned that in his introduction is precisely what Eric White's called population politics in both papers. You're indicating a shift to where, you know, populations of people are always important politics but where actually the focus of international politics becomes the management or movement or even gratification of people. And what's interesting about both papers is that the weight of normative change seems to be actually post the, you know, what we consider the first world war, or 18 rather than in the war itself and maybe I don't know that I'm reading your paper correctly I'm reading yours. Then there's a war changes in that immediate, what we call post war period and therefore the piece, the new piece in 23 reflects that. And of course, the question here is about legitimacy so if 19th century dynastic imperial politics simply above frontiers and dynastic legitimacy we're moving into a new era where legitimacy stems from the idea of national population usually understood as a single entity to find one way or another. And what's really interesting about Laura's papers that it makes this kind of concrete in the sense of practices of everything from passports to border surveillance to all managing refugees and so on. What's, I think, again, it's in the background of those papers, what James thought called kind of making the territory people of economic exchange legible right so seem like a state. That's a classic book, and you seem to state intervening areas, violently, but also, of course, being encoded in international law that centrality of populations. And of course, we have this call, we, you know, both papers pick up on two big themes, one of which is this tension between the idea of the nation state has been the sort of emerging non international politics and world order, versus the messy this is just the way realities of populations and people are distributed and the conflicts in general. And also attention between empires and nation states having are being defined within certain territories, but there are attempts to reconstruct a global economy that's fundamentally one transnational marketplace and there is a financial change and I wonder if I should lower you might bring that out of this work because I just immediately post for a period where your examples are drawn are really drawn to protectionism tariff, high tariffs. Industrial protectionism, but I wonder if what you're really talking about a certain period. Yeah, okay so you may be. commenting. I did wonder about the civilization of the board and having said, I should say at the original conference, and I think they can blur the book so I'm not against that. I wonder what you're really talking about is told, rather than. So, and the narrative shift, if you like, actually is in the 1914 18 period, and the key, the key idea is seeing populations as a military resource. The mass mobilizations the total mobilizations in total war, and what we're really seeing is a continuity, absolutely high commands break down and you have paramilitary violence, decentralized violence spontaneous violence, but I mean, what's the incentive what's the driver, let's actually reform and appreciate populations so, but you'll come back on that question. I suppose one of the sort of depressing things and J. I just went to talk to me about what's happening in Ukraine now, is there some, is there a certainty, is there a, an inability to a world shifting to the nation state being the ultimate organizing principle is the violence that we saw the 20th century continues today, just inherent in that and there's no saving. I guess is what I'm asking. And I'll leave it there. So. Thank you so much was there really, really useful and interesting comments. I think you're right. First of all, about the kind of economic zones. So, one of the things that happens, but I think it's kind of under emphasized and the large around the way to this period is that in the requirements of mandatory authority is included strictures about maintaining zones of free trade, right, which actually is the context how borders are are enacted on the ground with places like Syria. Palestine is a little bit of an exception in this regard, because if that's this other, you know, structure about the creation of the Jewish National Home, which is also the trend of the mandatory documents. But so for example, just to give you one brief example about this in the Turkish Syrian mortar lands, which is a space for considerable numbers of both Armenians and Syrians for refugees were settled in the 1920s. And again in the 1930s. There, this is essentially an open border through most of the 1920s until the crash of 1929 when Turkey made the decision to enact a new terror regime as a kind of protectionist strategy France as the, as the as the supervisor of the mandatory state was not allowed to enact terror regime. So their interest in creating maintaining and enforcing that order is significantly less in this period than the Turkish interest right and so we have a kind of conflict I think you know this that the creation of in the 1920s which is very different right now this time we get to the 30s. You know there is this idea that this is going to be a reformulation of older imperial free trade films right only this time, it will have the mechanisms of the nation states to sing it. And I think that we need to think a little bit about how that worked or how people thought it might work right how nationalism, how the nation state, how territoriality could help to what trips this this what is essentially an older imperial economic order, rather than the reverse and I think there were a lot of ideas about how this to work, and that the experiment territories are kind of a space for this is being worked out in practice, and in a lot of aspects. And then only inevitability of the nation state model I think is associated with it, I mean, I, I think it's hard to be optimistic at this point about the possibility of a world built in nation states that is not inherently violent I think we have very little historical evidence that the contrary is a real possibility. But I do think, you know, there's, there's nothing inevitable about the rise of that system but it's relatively short lived in short term. And, and one of the things that's interesting about focusing on these people's who fall outside the nation state system is that you can see how carefully it's constructed and all of the ways in which it's actually difficult to enforce right. And so, so perhaps it's worth kind of thinking about the kinds of alternatives that were presenting themselves on the ground and great local ways during this period as well as the kind of architecture that's emerging at the sites at least this training and the emergence that are actually a lot. So. I think the only thing that's worse than the violence nation states is the violence of chaos in the absence of the next step. And the collapse of empire created a field of forces purely obsolete. Again, no the story we're going to hear about our 20s. He was drawing attention to the fact that these atrocities took place in 1921. I don't believe they were ordered this Michael might know better, but soldiers took advantage of being in positions of violence. It's not necessarily the states that created the violence. 1500 programs against Jews in Ukraine in 1919 alone. And was there a state probably not the first of those programs was Polish. I think the chaos of the years back to make it to 23 is something that may be necessary for your interpretation, Laura. This goes into Robert give out and John Lawrence attempt to say 1918 is a false sunset of war. I share that I think war did not end in 1918, but people that hope to create a territorial solutions. I still go back to this point that 1922 is a year of exhaustion of enormous suffering on the part of people, many different parts of Europe that simply could not be sustained and in particular in Russia. So after four or five years of civil war, the recognition of the most of the regime is part of the story. The final point, it actually links with what we're saying. Total war to me is almost a cliche these days or not. If I contributed to making it so I apologize. But at the same time, something happens to the manipulation of violence in states that have not made their authority legitimate yet. You know what happens in 1418 are legitimate states like Germany, most of them great behavior badly. What else isn't. But when you have states in the making, creating their, their violence, including the Turkish Republic. So one area that I want to point out that I think my existence and I think I would be useful for you to are. I don't think we've reflected enough on this centrality here of the Armenian, the end of the Armenian Republic, not the Armenian Caucasian, the Anatolian. Here's an example of people exchanging justice for peace. Sacrificing the Armenians was necessary for there to be a peace treaty in which the boundaries of Greece and Turkey could be fixed. That was that was that was the deal. And the, what shall I call it the myth or the illusion was that there really was already on Armenia, the way it goes in the years that the Palestinians don't exist. They have their state already. It's the same argument that the Armenians loss of territorial integrity was a price it was a price. In the proceedings when I have those readers he doesn't realize that everyone knows and no one says the truth about this fundamental point that to stabilize the economic release. And it wasn't a trade. And I think that there is an area where we can talk about economic interests and the part of weakened imperial powers blowing the idea of self determination out of the water. The final point though I think that we need to do is to really specify what is there in 1922, your story is longer than that. If you really say, look at these 12 months, I take it that was part of the purpose of globalizing this. I think we have some elements to talk about exhausted as a fundamental global phenomenon. Enough 12 years 10 years 12 years of war 10 years of war. How can people go on. Imagine what's going on and you pray for another 10 years. It's simply beggars beggars belief that it's that notion. It's excruciatingly difficult moments, less of the exhaustion, but I think maybe a thing to probe in the remainder of this. Great. Thank you. But I see the number of question and chat rising and I think they're under the room or online questions to just start within the room and then we'll go online so anyone. Please. I think the Balkan was very close to it. Because that led to the situation and totally which was very close to it. And I started to know that people all had to be corrected. Corrected by expanding the population. Whether there was an alternative to that, which could have been reached before 1922. I don't know. It's conceivable. You know, an exchange of populations before the exchange of populations. Very difficult to bring about particularly once the Turkish nationalists established a certain force in eastern Turkey. And more and more clear, but going to be checked. Any solution solution. If I could explode the chair for a moment to go on for another issue. Something which didn't crop up much in your presentations was the question of law. The laws of war. Which ought to have been very important in this period. But I'm not sure that they were. Even out of the sand. And there were lawyers around. We think that on the Greek side. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. Sa. The. The. The. The. The. The. The. I guess. Olitos as well. Yes. Yeah, co. Distinguish professor.ца . Ejenigen wrote it very interesting. Short room about his experience. And I wonder. were a war of the eight conventions and so on. Then you have a war in which there were large-scale violations probably on all sides. And then you have the post-war period where even words, there were large-scale violations all over the place as you look at the culture. And what were the lawyers doing at this time? Were they producing interesting analyses or recommendations or were they doing nothing? And what about the League of Nations? And the League of Nations should have meant a new start in considering the justification for practices on the battlefield and so on. Whether or not I simply don't know, so I throw that question to some of you that was better than mine. One sort of point about it. I think the sequel of Luzon is the outrageous behavior of Mussolini and Khufu because what he does is to dare the League to act the way everyone who created the League said they should have acted in 1914 when a small state or a state is outrageously attacked by another. And they didn't. Appeasement might be was invented in Khufu. It was way, way before. In that moment the issue of the League of Nations being the carrier of the law of nations, much less the important prisoners of war. I think Mussolini deliberately did it and when the League was challenged, politists could do nothing about it. Alternately, the imperial issues saying we want peace, not justice. Let Mussolini have what he wants, recognition, more publicity than he would true. But the humiliation of the League was only second to the humiliation. This was a terrible moment. The other point is a lot of the work that you talked about quite frankly with Mr. Michael was in the Tsarist legal profession, not the Bolshevik. The great international lawyers of the period before 1914 were brushed aside by the Bolshevik regime. Not completely, not completely, but mostly the strength of the humanitarian law before the First World War is Russian itself. Unfortunately, the Bolshevik regime has many casualties. That's really interesting. That's definitely an under-recognized moment. But also, I think, with regard to the League of Nations, the League accepted essentially any kind of military combatant part of the mandate states of which it was to be a super concern. And so, and this is made explicit many, many times, right from 1929 to 22, final version of the Hafer Palestine Assign. The League accepted, for instance, the use of air power in Iraq against civilians on the ground as a legitimate use of mandatory authority. Very similarly, they supported French atrocities in Syria during the uprisings from 1925 to 27. This happened repeatedly in Palestine. So, I mean, these are not moments that go unchallenged at the level of international discussion and international legal discourse, but they are repeatedly, there's a consistent pattern of the League accepting the use of colonial brutality as a legitimate use of force. And I think that that really fundamentally undermines any claim that we might have to establishing a kind of regime, a legal regime concerning the conduct of war in, you know, for anywhere going forward. So, I think that's also kind of an important venue of the activity to consider. It's kind of as if you're saying that great power, the so-called great powers could do what they wanted, because they could bring the League along with it. I certainly with regard to the mandatory system, that's absolutely the case. Yes. I think what we're going to do is just shift between online audience and in-room and virtual panelists. So, George, what are you interested in? So, how about I read a question and read some questions that would go to Lena, who's kind of a bit upset, right? And then I would go back to you. So, I'm just going to read two questions from Ari Luton, submitted them in the chat. So, he says, my questions, I hope everyone can hear, are somewhat technical regarding nomenclature of terminology and how they're connected to periodization. So, his first question is to Lord. So, Ari asks, given the legal codification of the term refugee, especially in the U.S. and its immigration laws, imagine later, only the way of the Second World War, what was the terminology phrase used at the time, thanks to describe displaced populations. Will it be fair to Ari, says, that you suggest that many development historians of displacement and transfer identity as taking place after 1945 originates in apprenticeships about the biological question of refugees? And to Professor Jay, Ari Luton asks, says, he believes that the phrase ethnic cleansing came into white U.S. in the 1990s, in the context of the words from Yugoslavia. It is a liberal, literal translation of the circle Croatian expression. I'm not going to pronounce that. Ari, I'm sorry. It's because, see, what's something called ethnic cleansing. Here, wouldn't be fair to Ari that the date on the points ending that conflict in the 90s did not fall back on the same logic of lojan. So, that's Ari's question. May I, quick on that point, Antonio Pereira in the chat also has to add, so that's connected. He says, on ethnic cleansing, the term became a bit of white currency as translation of the circle Croatian expression. Yet I know that the similar one, Antonio, says it existed in Romanian already in the 1940s. That I may pronounce, but if I carry on, and was used to describe policies of Antonescu regime, aimed to exclude and expel non-Romanians, mostly Jews. My professor, Vita, expand on the Russian expression he mentioned and provide us with more details on the conflict. So it's both our thing. I think so. Sorry. Yeah, everyone else is interested in the Russian origins of ethnic cleansing. That's not something I know about. The refugee question, so, Ari, it's supposed to be S-W. And the refugee question is an interesting one because people think, as you point out correctly, that the origin of the legal definition of refugee comes into being in 1951 with the U.S. Convention on Refugees. Actually, there's a long legal history required to that. And one of the things, this is being hammered out during this period. So actually, the term refugee is used, I believe, many, many times from, you know, really right from very far onward. It's one of those terms like minority that comes to be a feature of the kind of post-war international diplomatic discourse. The office on refugees, the high commissioner on refugees, this is a word that is current. It is defined in the mid-1920s with regard to a very few specific national groups, right? So you can only be a refugee if you are Russian in the first instance, Armenian in the second instance, and then in 1928 it was expanded to include a serial healthiest. So it's something, and it's kind of explicitly, there's a regime around us that explicitly says, just because you have been displaced over a national border does not make you a refugee, which is essentially the opposite of what the definition of lands on in the post-war period. So it's tied in, I think there's a material history to this, right? It's tied into groups that the so-called Greek powers have client relationships with to some degree, right? And that definition lasts for quite a long time. And just it's notable, for instance, that even in this period that Kurdish populations were displaced in the same conflicts, in the same moments, do not qualify as refugees in this international ratio that's emerging. Very briefly, the United Systems discussion talks about the ambiguity of the expulsion of populations after 45 Volga Germans, the Crimean Tatars, the Sudeten Germans as success stories. The point is we take the term to be an insult. The ironies of the Russian language are, so to say, many and truthful, but they point to the possibilities that such expulsions might have stabilized the society. I don't like that word. The President, who I think knows the four histories, but the final point is that the concept of refugee then goes back to Kishinyev, goes back to before the 1905 revolution. Kishinyev, by the way, was a smaller massacre than any of those that happened after 1919 in Ukraine and smaller than what's happening today in Ukraine. But its echo effect was because of the public publicity in the United States, but it had a lot to do with the construction of the concept of refugees and the responsibility of the Western powers. And actually, that's what relates to your earlier point as well about the Balkan War, because the first state to have a state-level refugee regime, which is in fact what they call the River Ottomans, and that happens as early as 1859 when they began to set up these commissions to resettle refugees from the developments in Anatolia from here. So it does have, you know, it has a longer legal history. Should we go to Gina and then bring it forward and then switch back forward? So, Lena, you can unmute yourself then. Hello and thank you for a very interesting panel. I would like to ask Professor Robson if we can expand our vision a little bit more globally would you link and I mean if and would you link your point on territorial integrity and the immobilization of refugees with the wider context of severe restrictions of migration in the USA in many other states or with the the putting of Indians in the USA in reserves and with other kinds of restrictions on movement. Thank you. Yeah, I think that's a very good point and that this is a part of a broader scheme to restrict migration and I want to I agree completely, I think it does have to do with these kinds of broader restrictions. But also one of the things that we don't take enough from this stuff I think is that some of these restrictions are intended to keep people in as well as keep people out right and so the the restriction of migration in the US you know has to do with exclusion. But there are many ways in which you know the questions around labor migration in particular are quite fraught during this period and so I think it's partly about the kind of closing down of states but it's also about the ensuring that people will be present to construct these new national entities and realities that people are going to be able to see emerge. So I think I think it's an excellent and one that really does make this into a kind of global moment where migration is nobody's able I think to handle the 20s without seeing the fact that it ended the first great wave of globalization. That's the end of it and you know the re-assertion of globalization as labor mobility being essential to this is long after the second world war maybe the point of stability of the nation's state is that it's not globalized. It has the capacity to live independently. So I continue reading some of the questions. Yeah I was just saying the point just I think it's bounced back of course. Okay so I also read it. So first it's Laura Robson and I'm referring to the advice and purpose you mentioned but that's part of your argument that the refugees are actually they have to stabilize territorial integrity because it reminds me that actually if you look at the central standard case that you also find that there are certain problems in the community so it's not necessarily pertaining to territorial integrity but to the institution of those institutions that are used to define six energy and most importantly animal rights in the Austro-Hungarian age because it suddenly becomes not a legalese but a transnational institution. Many people are stranded in countries that they couldn't obtain citizenship because their animal rights is in another country and therefore they are aliens in the sense that they are not necessarily bothered by the state. This is the second other I think that in the central standard again it's quite important that the state is still disposed so for example passports are very often issued at local level so that makes it easier for people to maneuver to gain agency to move forward and this is really and it also pertains to a certain logic internal tension between the logic of the state apparatus that they still operate with that kind of programming logic and not necessarily an airing with the logic of the nation state so they treat co-attendees as aliens they make obstacles in their game of gaining citizenship even though they seem to be legally. Interesting and I think that kind of good it could be a good point of comparison and the other one it's more of an impression than we think in the politics some first modernist impression that listening to the local and also reading the paper that came to my mind was the importance of the kind of ephemeral understanding of boundaries and I think the context very well with the other that could have contributed to this civilisation but came to my mind as the example of the Hungarian internment system that was established during the war to control dangerous groups of population was the ethnic minority at one point it was merged with the treatment of the British and also the same camps that were originally internment camps and vice versa the prisoners of war were at the same time also used as labor they could get integrated to a certain extent into civilian society and at one point since 1918 onwards these internment camps were used to control post-politicalities and westerns and for the after 1990s in Africa the tens of thousands were in turn who were suspicious of being tortured and also the returning here with Soviet Union war went through push through these internment camps in a sense in a way of examining the loyalty potential loyalty so but that also tells me how external and internal boundaries of the state were really uncertain um yeah that's a very interesting comparison I think I'm especially struck with what you're saying about locally produced and distributed passports which points to and I think one of the really interesting the things that one of the things that interest me about this idea is that I think when we when we look from the top down when we read the treaties you know and you think about the the border the territorial missions but yes set the borders but then there is there's a step underneath that right where people have to think about how to do that in practice right what that will actually look like in practice and that in practice it's it's it's very much more localized than we might imagine right to the extent that it happens at all and I think there are there are big spaces where it actually doesn't happen right where we don't have you know I mean in French mandatory Syria they don't even have maps of the border area to the late 1930s right and so so they don't people don't know where where this line is right even though it's been drawn on that um so I think just just to say that I appreciate the point it's it's a very interesting point of comparison and it reminds us of the kind of complications of the practicalities of enforcement and I think maybe raises the question of how desirable that enforcement actually is right is this in some ways the system that it's more useful in theory in the abstract that can exist in the abstract and be enforced kind of at certain moments but not necessarily one that needs to permeate down to every day or to be in life in these across all of these spaces thank you I think the important very important sort of your comment is to show me the multi-faceted nature of refugee threats and the biggest one we have is carriers of disease. Nansen wanted to liberate prisoners of war who hadn't made it home to us we were hungry or on our journey we also wanted to stop that's one reason to settle people to stop them from transmitting all the diseases that they got in their caps in in Constantinople all the way over to the estate degrees to stop the spread of epidemic and the idea that refugees are carriers sometimes of bad ideas of diseases is one reason to immortalize them to keep them there and my guess is that we're going to see people deal with this problem in Poland and Bulgaria with respect to Ukraine and the population fortunately now we also see that they recognize that there are psychological difficulties. Well as it was yesterday one of the Prime Minister spokesman said you know you know he thought that there's you know three million Ukrainians moving west and by the way they all had COVID all right so it's not it's your point absolutely sorry for one more question yeah should be that's do you think you want to give it to them this this is okay okay what is that you know don't you're who are sadly there's a given issue so he can't get himself to fix that but he submitted a question on land and I have a couple more so I'll try it's a long question so maybe we take two of them so Davide asks says two fabulous papers by twelve star historians and the subtle and open reference to Ukraine is appropriate and time and very correct if I have you so to concur now Davide says I'm wondering if the way to connect the two papers could be the following so Davide could reconsider interpret immobility and the delusion of territorial integrity that went with it as the antithesis of chaos and the horror by QE a baroque artistic expression that's one question and isn't chaos the ultimate fear of policy makers who seek for trepidation and argument peace so this is that this point should I bring in another yeah let's bring it together and I'm going through the chat Rodney Bitten has a bit of a question so really now could it be that 1914-1918 style war because artists rather than civilization of war has been the exception to the long third north yes the lozane only formalized the process that had begun was like after the first world war in 1912 and if you go back to the Greek Revolution in the 80s you find almost all of the factors presented by professor Wiener ethnic cleansing non-state actors violence against civilians so that's professor Wiener's point so maybe we can take this doing that I was struck by an article we just edited on this period of the economic chaos and the preparation of the Greek military operation in Anatolia because this cost us because this because this is brilliant complete you want to use the word chaos I think it shows lack of preparation lack of logical movement towards what is necessary or for the military operation to be sustained and they should have known by late 1919 yes because the finance minister was warned and this paper seemed to me to show blindness on the part of both the Venezuelan party and the king's party as to the absolute essential nature of economic planning for military operation kind of that resulted in nemesis that resulted in the most possible outcome for the Greek people the other side with that I think is is very important is that the League really did with the staff of view that the Allies fought to protect territory integrity of Belgium but the invasion really mattered and I think it really did matter it wasn't a light cover it mattered what was there for the purpose of stopping the next Wilhelm II or a small country now that's why we got away with it in some ways the peace and stability we're talking about mattered more than saying that we're there for the purpose of stopping the chaos that comes out of bullies like Putin inventing and then I think that's the difference yeah it's interesting I mean there are some ironies but use of these kinds of frames right or I think there is this post-war chaos that is extremely violent and then there the imposition of you know and I guess I'm speaking together about the kind of ex-autonomant territories that those are also extremely violent populations right and from the level of civilians on the ground you know when we look at for instance Palestine in the late 1930s is it better is it different I'm not sure so you know and this relates to the earlier question about whether the violence of the nation state is you know inevitable and I think that this chaos the only way in which we see you know there at least for certain spaces for these newly colonized spaces you know this chaos is not gone in 1923 right and that this violence continues to be a major major feature of the entirety of the interwar years and that it's hard to see it's hard to see this as a kind of you know it's hard to I quite hard to say you know that this goes my paper goes beyond this and that you know it's beyond 1922 it's beyond 1923 it's it's all the way through the 1920s and the 1930s and then there's there's another conflagration so I'm not sure when to identify the end point to that chaos but we need to think about this a moment before. Yeah this is a very good point those of them are studying international war right here a lot of obsession but I think 1924 is a good answer and the Olympic games are part of it there's a symbolic language of what constitutes peace peace has to be the start but I do think that's a try to a 24 bar there is our times of the end of war and the beginning of peace. There's a very quick point that's the final submission I have an apology for this someone from someone GG not me I usually decide. It wasn't the American war. It wasn't the American Civil War the progenitor of the modern concept of the force of war so Sharon was master of the sea that's that was a question of common you are so you're the guest so go ahead. The initial of civil war as vicious and brutal is after all a classical theme in every sense of the term but when I when I resist I do not share it with other viewers of the number of German historians the full 1945 it was the Civil War it's in my view war degenerated like a mutant virus it turned into a number of multiple killers under the control of no one and in fact we use the word war as a unity whereas it really is such an unstable category I think we use the word peace when it isn't there either but when we didn't reflect literally stop and what did the contemporaries think the word meant I think the word war is not the north versus the south the word war is nobody is safe and your neighbor is not necessarily on one of her seven just to comment on that I mean I would be remiss in the worst case department just to you know we define war you know you for precisely the purposes we want so claus witsian war is about waging war between uh the nation states for particular purposes the colloquium but you know it's interesting about the 20s in particular you know right up to uh the pre-war war 1927 non-capital war it's actually the uh the reform reform but but the different attempts to define war is a different way so soviet lawyers wanted to outlaw interstate the war that allowed revolutionary war the imperial powers wanted to allow a new country or actually a called colonial violence is war I mean in colonial spaces but that's not war in international law and then so on so just following on the comment from gg but lord did you want me to say okay I think I think I'm going to wrap up because I'm told by my assistant uh uh chair who's monitoring the internet for me and thank you for that right uh so we're I think we're going to now switch over to directing the next panel so sure please go on that take the take over thank you thank you after this first panel after this first panel and we make a quite a geographical switch and bringing uh the u.s through gongsonianism or wilsonism I see both and a focus of on wilsonism in western europe our two papers take us to the far ends of western europe italy and spain our two speakers or maxi miliano fuentes with poder and also sorry the name escapes me now yes so it's it's ireland in spain sorry sorry doro gannon from um sorry um I hope I pronounced that well I'm really not that pretty hilarious I apologize for that so maxi miliano will speak on the on the topic of the bilsonian moment from the bilsonian moment to the bilsonian disappointment in neutral countries transnational races of the first world war in spain and he's critically focusing on a period from 1917 to 1923 he's associate professor at the university of here on spain and deeply involved in a project called democracy and its enemies and again that critical period starting in 1917-18 running all the way through 1931 and involving spain italy portugal and as far out as argentina he is also interested in the global character of world war one versus the status of neutral countries and his current work builds on what we will be hearing today the impact of wilsonianism in the crisis of liberalism in spain again in that critical period he has studied transnational neutralities in spain argentine and argentina and also worked on cultural and political exchanges coming again out of spain italy and argentina and our second speaker dara gannon again I apologize if I don't pronounce that correctly we'll be speaking on writing revolutionary ireland into the global 1922 he's a research fellow with affiliations with the prince university belfast but also university college dublin and new york university under review is his work on worlds of revolution ireland's global moment with the focus on irish nationalism previously in great again in that critical period from 1919 through 1922 so although let maximiano start then we will follow the same productive system of representatives taking about 15 minutes each and in the meantime please keep your questions calm thank you well good afternoon uh does it work properly can you hear me yes yes yes yes thank you very much so good afternoon and and thank you georgias and you all for for the organization of this uh workshop and i would like to share my screen if i may with a very brief presentation because i am i'm virtually so it's it's it's a way probably that will work better okay does it it's working yes okay so so uh so um well um the the presentation is uh the consideration that uh the experience of uh neutral countries have has been uh an executive for a long time and at the same time uh uh a national point of view i mean the the works produced by uh scholars and and uh research done uh research is done on uh on neutral countries particularly in spain have have been dominated by uh narrow point of view and national i would say point of view so um the the so the departing point is is this idea this transnational term the link between international or turn of the historiography of the first world war and neutralities so that's why i highlighted some quotes you are you are you can read here um by john whore and and other uh eminent scholars considering first of all the limits the the paradox between the national the nation state and national efforts they were central uh in the first world war but uh the difficulties to understand this uh conflict within national frameworks after that the second point is uh the necessity of distinguishing between validity and obliterance that has been that was highlighted by uh uh company on on people say um uh some years ago and finally the consider the consideration of neutrality as a as a relevant point to understand that the experience of one state and its people uh must be considered within uh i mean within the international environment that the ratio the relationship between states these elements are uh the ones that um determine uh the circumstances are and legitimacy of neutrality this is the departing point as i said before uh because i am my my probably the main element in this introduction is um that uh we have to consider neutral states and of course Spain within these neutral states as part of the global which in that the the war did not close as we all know the close did not close the processes open uh within the global vision but and it uh it didn't uh closed the processes within neutral countries too so uh the last years of the conflict the the period i'm considering between 1979 1923 uh has to be considered must be considered as a part of these global phenomena that's why uh this presentation of my paper analyzes the influence of the american president with the wilson ideas his proposals in spain in spain during the first war war and after that so uh based on the analysis of the impact on liberal socialist and republican groups but also within the proto-independentist or autonomous catalan movement and finally also within uh the global uh sorry within the the colonial conflict in morocco i uh will argue that the passage from the fascination or the wilsonian moment the so-called eternal moment to this will send disappointment was a relevant element to understand the post war period and the and the beginning of the dictatorship of primordial revenge degree so uh are you probably know the uh spain uh was neutral during the whole war however the debate over neutrality led to a heat controversy between pro-life and pro-german sectors uh by the spring of 19 sorry by by the spring of 1917 the war uh became a great revolutionary force along europe and also in spain pensions erupted during the summer of 1917 and in a in a tribal crisis you can see some images uh that link debates on war but also uh a crisis that involved military sectors political a political sector so-called deputies assembly that took place in in barcelona and also as a social mobilization um that in many senses has had points in common with what was happening in greece or in portugal and also of course uh in the countries that were a part of the of the battle those that that were what were part of the of the war i mean um after that or during this social uh uh of heavell in uh 1917 this social and political mobilization took place as i said as i said before uh between pro-life and pro-german sectors that um as the argentine ambassador in in Madrid another neutral country of course argentina i mean uh uh characterized or or uh um perceived as political flags of extreme right and extreme left respectively this this is a document he wrote in march 1918 between uh 1917 economic situation continued for worsen another point in common with other neutral and and belligerent countries um and um these uh became even worse uh during the last month of the war hunger and unemployment contributed to radicalization of the population that's why 1918 was the year that the gist of most working mobilizations throughout the whole war period within this uh uh framework the last the war were marked by the rise of the new project represented by lennon wilson uh it was present in two aspects on the one hand uh in an intense uh debate that took place between pro-alive sectors concerning with wilson and lennon's proposal on self-determination this was a debate i insist that took place within the pro-alive sector the liberal republicanist socialist and a reformist in in a in a in a uh wider sense on the other hand you know it took place in also in an in a process of radicalization in the labor movement that gave rise to dissident groups in social parts that finally would would uh create the communist parties also the presentation of wilson's 14 points and tenor in 1918 1918 sorry wilson anism emerged also in spain and it it took place in in two ways first one a reformist a more liberal more democratic horizon in which the pro-alive sector the pro-alive sectors were they found in wilson in the figure of wilson the ideas of wilson uh the possibility of breaking down uh relation with with uh relationships with germany i mean spain uh with germany and this change could be also perceived or could be also projected as a in the sense of a democratization within uh the the monarchy in spain secondly in all these groups from the left wing to conservative sectors such as the regionalist league the league regionalista in katalonia or even in the vast country so in wilson ideas an opportunity to reach a new federalist european and spanish scenario most of scholars have underlined the second line the the the the the relevance of wilson ideas within the uh particularly in katalonia but also in in the vast country however the reformist horizon the the idea of the idea of wilson as a leader of of a new democratic european spain uh has not been uh underlined i think uh and it's probably the main point of this presentation this fascination of wilson uh within uh liberal reformism also of course socialist emerged clearly during the last part of the war both of course in katalonia but also in other regions uh wilson as you can see in the quote of miguel dunamuno here uh was perceived as a liberator of the war also socialist intellectuals and politicians such as marcelino domingo or or uh louisa rakistan thought that he represented a wonderful flowering of idealism in this in this sense wilsonianism was built within a liberal socialist and also of course republican uh uh reformism as a horizon for democratization wilsonianism was also uh met uh with a great force also in katalonia um the katalan problem was directly related to the victory of the allies and the principles of of self-determination it's a quote for from uh a journal in Buenos Aires it's a very interesting quote because it links also two neutral countries that they are perceiving not only the idea of democratization but also the principles of self-determination in this uh aspect uh it's uh katalonia probably is one of the uh uh most relevant regions in spain uh because um wilsonism we could say exploded in katalonia during the last uh months of the war and particularly uh in the during 19 uh 1919 um in this scenario the conservative willing party the the liga regionalista sorry okay uh developed together with other groups uh a process uh that we could separate in two phases the first one that took place within the first half of the of 1919 uh both the conservative sectors as well as their radicals on the left developed the most important autonomous campaign in the first part of the 20th century in parallel this campaign took place in parallel with Paris uh negotiations in brazil in the second phase after the the failure of these autonomies this pro-federalist we could say campaign and also um after the climax of the or during the climax of political radicalization in Barcelona in the spring of 1917 radical nationalist groups independent these groups headed by two groups one francophile one and young wilson in his wilsonian story represented by the com comitee nacional catalana national uh catalan committee uh no longer capital of mobilizing mobilizing limits themselves to presenting the dimension representatives of the victorious powers in paris however the ruling ruling and conservative liga regionalista in barcelona in katalonia the ruling party this instead itself from any possible link between wilsonism and separatism i mean i mean independentism and tried to close this autonomous process it to it it lead it to uh to the uh will what what what i call the wilsonian disappointment in katalonia faced with wilsonian failure the catalan and spanish left wing sectors began to look towards other scenarios such as the bolshevik revolution and island um despite the fact that some intellectuals continue to maintain their faith in wilson and the league of nation the project of the league of nations violence unleashed in katalan streets of course not only in katalan street or within uh i mean in spain as a whole uh but particularly in katalan streets in 1917 1920 this violence uh unleashed between ultra katalanists and ultra spanishists we could say and also between anarchist and param parametric forces supported by the toughest sectors of businessmen and it led to the radicalization of katalanism whose most radical expression was katalan state stat katalan a group founded in 1923 23 sorry uh it's very interesting that within this group the present it's very interesting to highlight uh the presence of daniel domingo was the leader of the national katalan committee the wilsonian group i uh referred before in this new group this new group sorry led by francés comacia who would be the one of the presidents of katalonia during the second republic and in this new group certified the transition from the wilsonian democratic model to the iris insurrectionary model in in radical katalanism sorry this the last disappointment it's what took place in morocco uh some uh years some months ago i should say with uh after during the after being uh after being part of the league of nations as a non-permanent member spain uh diplomatic activity package on the moroccan moroccan question with the objective of achieving a prominent international position however spain's focus in northern africa would fail in 1921 in the so-called disaster of anual uh which has been compared to italy adua uh italy's adua uh they the reefies uh in morocco sucked international recognition for the fact that independence obtained after uh the disaster of anual in 1921 however uh despite the globalization of their demands uh i mean they received support from africa to latin america the answer of schneiba focusing on its lack of competence to intervene in the conflict in this sense also we could say that uh it was the second wilsonian disappointment however i think the most relevant one is the the um is the first i uh underlined finally two or three conclusions first of all we could say in a short but that in a short time wilson and the league of nation became symbols of great failure in spain the failure was fundamental in two senses firstly in the process of revision criticism and in its more radical cases challenging of liberalism and democracy and secondly in another parallel process of searching for a new place on the international scene which led during the 20s to a reformulation of spanishism that would lead to the concept of concept of hispanidad and one of the key concepts of the dictatorship of frima de riviera and of course of francis regime in the 30s and 40s second the traces of the greek war in spain lasted at least until 1923 uh why because the coup d'etat of the day of milio primera riviera in spain in september 1923 was justified both as a remedy against the disaster of frimal 1921 and the radicalization of kevlin nationalism the two aspects i tried to underline finally the main idea is that despite its neutrality spanish evolution expressed a broad european global process process that has as main elements political radicalization violence and the emerge of the emergent emergence of renewed nationalist groups thank you so much thank you maxi miliano and then without further ado in the interest of that let's move on to dr garen garen thank you thank you so much um i think i'll do the obligatory mic jack to begin with can everyone hear me yes okay great um so it's a real pleasure to be with you albeit in this case um via zoom i would much prefer to be with you in person of course i'd like to thank the organising committee um georgias gonda joe lina and robert gravarth of course as well for again the kind invitation to speak with you this afternoon and it would be remiss of me not to thank the hrc the arts and you and these research council without whose support this research would not be possible and so in the interests of the wider audience and attendance today i'm going to give our deliver an abridged version of the pre-circulated paper um to read that and i'll also integrate some thoughts and observations in relation to the papers which are our our our our colleagues have pre-submitted and link those to my own research so a question where in the world was the irish revolution a century after the historical facts the geography of the irish revolution remains open to debate the dramatic series of political events known as the irish revolution east arising 1918 general election war of independence partition civil war have traditionally been understood as an island story the irish revolution by such a reading was denoted by successive nationalist political and military campaigns to secure ireland's independence beyond the british empire the establishment of the irish free state and northern ireland polities within the british empire ultimately would bring the revolutionary period to a constitutional conclusion so the narrative of the irish revolution by this geographical interpretation was the story of ireland north and south however this paper asks do the ideas underwriting the ireish revolution as the possessive case suggests belong to histories and historians of ireland alone scholars of the long 18th century have begun to reexamine the dynamics of the french Haitian and american revolutions collectively as the so-called global age of revolutions indeed jeremy adelman quite recently has pressed the question historians now ask whether these were episodes within a wider conjuncture of global crisis and propelled by it might we ask whether the same applied to the second age of revolution now this paper suggests that to explore an so-called age of revolution with conceptual clarity and reflexive methodological praxis requires reflection on what's called the two geographies of global history and by that i mean the world and the word de-territorializing the ire's revolution in turn asks transnational questions of its history conceptual framework and archival memory what balance of global and local scripts imbue historical actors with revolutionary agency how do political revolutions develop and indeed proliferate over time and space and in what historical contexts do revolutionaries and indeed their historians conceive of transnational transformations so i'd like to address just three key themes or concepts in the course of this paper the first is communities of writing writing before the revolution the leader of the shin fame party arthur griffith famously observed that ideas on ireland existed behind a british paper wall quote on the inside she told ireland what she wanted the irish to believe about the world and on the outside she told the world what she wanted to believe about ireland unquote the establishment of doll erin by members of the shin fame party in january 1919 constituted a revolutionary attempt to subvert british imperial rule in ireland transnational correspondence i would argue became a key conduit for breaking through the british paper wall the act of writing consolidated relations with contemporary revolutionary movements for example the experience of sad saglul pasha and the egyptian waft movement exemplified this very literary experience saglul had led a 30-man egyptian delegation to paris in the spring of 1919 in an attempt to gain recognition of the egyptian independence movement at the preside peace conference and the doll representative in paris shanti o kellywood remark later quote he and i became really close friends as i glue wrote the british delegation claiming full freedom or at least the right to self-determination for egypt and this led to a long correspondence in all this letter writing i was always consulted by saglul unquote the latter indeed would return in kind through letters of recommendation for irish nationalists to fellow egyptian revolutionaries across europe so collaboration in writing between irish and egyptian nationalists i argue formed the basis for the emergence of an enclosed revolutionary circle of political activists across the post-war world and british intelligence would record a record similarly in 1920 in february last gabriel danuncio sent a secret mission to paris which appears to have had considerable results they carried letters to the irish egyptian and bird allegations in paris asking them to send representatives to italy in order to form an international anti-english committee which create which would create trouble in every colony unquote now danuncio the celebrated poet playwright and soldier had seized the port city of fiume for italy in the aftermath of the peace conference but was opposed by the socialist italian government rejecting the authority of the italian state he reestablished fiume as a proto fascist city-state independent of league of nations legislative authority now interestingly danuncio would himself write to the secretary general of the league of nations eric drummond drummond advising him that the high command of fiume was now voluntarily associating itself with the declaration of the irish republic and i think these connections between fiume the waft movement in egypt speaks very powerfully to what maxima maxima liana was just talked about in terms of the wilsonian disappointment and british intelligence sources further reported that a meeting to prepare for a conference of oppressed peoples and nations in fiume had been organized by the irish nationalist shanti o kelly to be attended by well-known and trusty trustworthy national revolutionaries from india and egypt in addition to representatives from fiume writing two arthrographics back in dublin just weeks later shanti o kelly indeed closed a proposal from danuncio formalizing plans for the league so i would argue that it was the act of writing which most closely linked the very disparate ideological causes of the irish republic the free state of fiume and the egyptian waft campaign letters between shanti o kelly gabriel danuncio and sadzah glue not only advised one another of significant developments in their respective national campaigns their repeated exchange of personal correspondence further served as markers of mutual trust and respect reflecting on the valence of transnationalism as interpretive approach patricia clavin is proper he heuristic utility of what she termed the epistemic community quote the term suggests both the community of interest a commonality of character as well as a group of individual individuals sharing the same locality or organization it is taken here as something different from the ethnically defined transnational society unquote revolutionaries from ireland italy and egypt enclosed ideas agendas and post war experiences through the cultural mediation of the written letter a community of writing so i move on to the second point which seeks to address this idea of a greater war so while some revolutionaries took up pens for the irish republic many across the post war world continued to take up arms in support of left and right wing ideological goals respectively berlin most notably was at the intersection of an east west ideological conflict the soviet inspired spartanist uprising in berlin led by car leibnacht and rose luxembourg by example was violently suppressed by the fricor a right wing paramilitary force remained a visible presence in early weimar germany as robert gravarth and john horn have noted of these greater war impulses quote it was the radicalization of politics during and after the great war that converted these competing movements and doctrines into a pan european ideological conflict unquote the irish republic was born into this post war battle of ideas right wing activists in post war berlin were interested in the events of the irish revolution and in the possibility of engaging with the ira for example for their own revolutionary purposes the irish bulletin which was a propaganda sheet translated for german audiences by nancy weiss power and then phd student undertaking a doctorate that frietrich wilhelm's university was a literary point of entry for german war veterans at a dinner party in berlin weiss power was introduced to admiral terpitz who of course had served as secretary of the german imperial naval office during the war and was indeed keen to receive copies of the irish bulletin quote he was very interested in the irish question from the point of view of the lessons and organized resistance to an occupying force to be derived from a study of irish methods he was most anxious that we should get someone to come over and just give talks in these bodies i explained to him the difficulties such as that few of our active men knew german and that even one could not be spared unquote now collaboration on propaganda projects in post war berlin brought irish nationalists into close contact with other political activists during his visit to the german capital in february 1921 george gaven duffy met with talith pasha who had served as the grand vizier of the ottoman empire during the first world war pasha who was widely considered to be the architect of the armenian genocide had gone into hiding in berlin in 1918 and of course many of our colleagues are writing are referring to the armenian question over the course of the next few days now gaven duffy however seemed to have had little difficulty with pasha's humanitarian record he indeed would write to dublin that talath is very keen on working with the independent irish state and indeed chima chima caravayan palai and verandrenath chatabadaia are interested in working in cooperation referring to the indian anti-colonial activists one month after meeting gaven duffy at his berlin hideout pasha was assassinated by an armenian gunman gaven duffy would send condolences on behalf of the irish republic to his successor nazim bay nazi wise power who kept a safe distance from pasha would later note quote immediately after meeting gaven duffy talath became uneasy and was heard to say that he had been told one should never trust an irish man which is interesting um whether the visit was the cause of his whereabouts being betrayed or not within a very short time talath was shot outside his house unquote now gaven duffy's entanglement with the architects of the armenian genocide is indicative of what has been termed by cairne clowns patel and spen rickard among others the dark side of transnationalism exchanges between transnational activists were at times characterized by moments of friction moreover in terms of this idea of the dark side of transnationalism these episodes emphasize that internationalism in the post war period was not necessarily coterminous with the virtues or indeed the values of liberal democracy post war revolutionaries represented a range of ideological positions and ethical dispositions activists from across the post war political divide indeed identified with the irish revolution on paper now to address the final theme of today's paper which is transcribing revolution the after effects of the 1917 revolutions were experienced long after the first world war armistice the revolutionary events in moscow had spawned a series of violent revolutions and counter revolutions in eastern europe wherein nationalist and local militias from finland to ukraine variously fought with but then against the forces of bolshevism in the context of communism's injunction to world revolution connections between russia and ireland often occupy the so-called official mind and indeed minutes of policy makers in london british propagandists sought to conflate the ideological basis of the irish and russian revolutions with the view to discrediting the political legitimacy of the irish republic so shin fain was literally linked to bolshevism by british propagandists such that a hyphenated identity became the designation used to describe the irish republic in british political terminology and that was shin fain bolshevism the british regimes identity identification of the irish and russian revolutions as reciprocal political movements i would argue was indicative of the choreography of a so-called imperial script of course few of the irish revolutionary elite identified with the idea of self-determination in radical left-wing terms kevin ohiggins most infamously would observe quote we were the most conservative minded revolutionaries that ever pop through a successful revolution unquote nevertheless this did not preclude irish nationalists from attempting to reach a formal political accord with soviet russia in the spring of 1921 in recognition of real politic in the east with the consolidation of bolshevik power following the red army's defeat of the white army in central and southern ukraine president of dole erin eamon devalera delegated patrick mccartan to travel to russia with the view to securing recognition of the irish republic arriving in mosco in february 1921 mccartan's commentary on soviet russia belied the ideological identification of the irish and russian revolutions quote nobody in authority nobody in authority in russia pretends to think that such a thing as liberty exists there here is not only nationalism but imperialism the russian laughs at the estonian language as the british are accustomed to laugh at the irish language it is vulgar horrible i am not so sure that self-determination for arland would raise much enthusiasm in official circles unquote now mccartan's meeting with the soviet secretary of state for foreign affairs georgia chicharin suggested further differences quote he pointed out that we were not in military control and that they had withdrawn recognition from the ukraine when germany was in the military occupation of its territory unquote returning to arland without agreement mccartan's correspondence with bolshevik representatives nonetheless was published in a british white paper entitled intercourse between belch bolshevism and shin vain indeed mccartan would write to the head of the nkid for anglo- roman countries georgia feinstein the whole thing was published largely to prejudice or case and partly to have a fling at russia and the documents themselves however show that we are thinking and acting as a sovereign nation unquote shin vain bolshevism remained i would argue a powerful script by which british policymakers transliterated the irish revolution six months later on the 6th of December 1921 representatives of the irish republic signed sign the anglo- irish treaty with the british government bringing to a written political conclusion the violent conflict which had defined british- irish relations since 1916 indeed i think the timing of this is quite interesting the 6th of December 1921 in view of what j winter suggested earlier as 1922 is the year of exhaustion so the anglo- irish treaty really anticipates that only by a matter of weeks so in conclusion to follow the words rather than the ethnic worlds of post-war activists is to recover transnational revolutionary movements and moments which transcended the irish nation state the irish revolution by such a reading was not only an anglophone experience it was not only a western experience indeed it was not only an irish experience while the institutions of doll erin and their archival records provide an essential empirical framework for documenting the history of irish nationalism and its political leaders a focused on established funds and catalogs can limit innovative interpretive approaches as fred kuber has written of nationalism's epistemological biases it is vital for the historian entering the national archive to quote imagine how people in different times and contexts thought and acted and to recognize the assumptions within one's own conceptual apparatus unquote situating the study of the irish revolution within transnational histories conceptual frameworks and archival records allows scholars i would argue to chart multiple multidirectional worlds of revolution to explore the post-war period as a second age of revolution this paper submits with historical accuracy necessitates scholarly collaboration across geographical cultural and linguistic boundaries framing the irish revolution as the subject of transnational historical inquiry further will facilitate greater understanding of historiographical inequalities and difference between scholars of the global north and the global south spatial frameworks intellectual traditions empirical sources it isn't that very dialectic between irish and international scholars western and eastern sources and local and global histories that the post-war worlds of revolution might be most accurately mapped to speak fluently of national histories in the post-war world ultimately is to research reflect and write in their second language transnational history thank you well thank you both so much i i'm going to try to focus in the few points i will make on what sets this panel apart how it builds on the previous one and then i'll make sure that i'll keep my comments short so that we really benefit from a question session which i thought was incredibly productive the last time at all and also because our time frame has slipped a little bit and i want to put it back in order so what came out and what what what makes me think and and i immediately admit that i am a little bit out of my own league league league of nations familiar to me that is so so what what rises to the the surface is a sense of idealism and disappointment this is disenchantment my question is then especially for maxi miliano is that not intrinsic that this is enchantment will eventually follow this kind of overblown idealism venezuelos would certainly speak to that is is the the overreach then not in a way already cooking up the disenchantment when you're going with unrealistic expectations i also want to reflect on the various meanings of neutrality very current question today and how do we give different definitions of neutrality due to different sets of circumstances of war and force forces to also not only requalify peace but also neutrality what is neutrality and who is allowed to be more neutral than others or up to upon what is the limit of neutrality when is it no longer a neutrality which neutralities need to be dependent and which can just slip and also very much like daryx emphasis on writing a language hugely important in the greek-turkish context what you would do with refugee minorities who actually need to fit the homogenizing framework of greece but don't speak the language how do you work that out um uh various ways of working that out but the language and communication which figures so prominently in daryx people when you see ireland communicating with egypt really kind of expanding the global reach through an intellectual debate just as much as a literary standoff giving a whole new meaning to a republic of letters right there for a while so communication across through writing communication through intellectual debate communication has communication which a hundred years earlier would have been so much more difficult to establish the tools of communication and how every modernization of communication even today can can redefine conflict and approaches towards peace that's something that interests me in these papers as well and i i i never to play reflect on the role of smaller smallish countries belgium was already mentioned i'm partial to that um the uh what role do they play as what agency do they have in what is occasionally and clearly a transport of the bigger players using smallish nations and their neutrality as bombs i like that direct use the the sense of an island story that can that he literally broke apart that brings me to the word insularity how insularity becomes in playing on the word island how it becomes impossible in what is clearly a globalizing conflict so i want to put that out there again also with the concept of that age of revolutions that we we question and break open globally geographically but also in a temporal framework did we never exit the first age of revolutions was there always something simmering underneath that clearly broke out in this particular moment and will break out again in the second world war is there is it does it still make sense to talk of age what first age second age of revolution when we see so many lingering effects having their way of you know surfacing again and then before i end i already want to put out a question there by jenny lia liuti thank you jenny for writing in what is the relationship between conservative perceptions of colonialism in spain and visions of empire and with that being said we have about 22 minutes which is along the short side for brief reactions ever so brief reactions and then for the questions and comments so maxi miliano if you want to take it up perhaps just relating to a few points i mean but keeping it ever so brief yeah thank you thank you so much for the for this insightful vision questions on on on my paper just but very briefly um i will listen this is one of the main points of the problem on on the perception of wilson uh within uh the liberal and republican socialist uh spain and uh it's uh um it's idealism and this perception of wilson is part of the logarithm on what is spain it's linked europe i mean the debate on the europeanness of spain um uh which which is directly linked to the to the to the 1980 sorry 1898 crisis the loss of of the last colonies of spain in the war against the united states so it's part of a longer much longer debate this idealism and wilson represents this horizon of democratization because in in some way wilson is part of a uh it's perceived as a as a a leader of a liberal democratic world uh in which spain would enter into europe in some way this is the the the key the debate spain isn't it is not europe it's it's uh after 1819 and through the war and through uh the uh principles of wilson spain could break with uh its own past this is a main point of course it it is idealistic but it's a wide very widely uh um uh uh percent at the present on the politicians of course this state is part of uh also of the debate of what it what means to be neutral and to be neutral means to be non-european for uh for uh the liberal and uh and social and so stand a reformist uh um politician and and intellectuals in europe is in the war and spain is not in the war so neutral to be neutral means to be non-european so wilson is part of the the perception of wilson is part of this uh debate of this perception um and of course it is linked uh to the the the question about the conservative procession perception of wilson in spain and the visions of the buyers why because conservative sectors accepting the gathering one i mean uh the sector the right-wing sectors and also conservative sectors uh within the spanish uh in spanish politics are far from being pro wilson wilson because wilson uh i showed a picture of uh of um of uh charles representing wilson as uh uh uh destroying realism so the in in this spanish empire uh is um is uh maximiano i'm gonna put your hold here for a moment because there's more to be said but also because your sound keep going in and out and because our time is limited i'm gonna switch to derek and let him make a few points i'm afraid to say that i think the connection is a little weak on either end but derek if you want to position come back to perhaps one or two points at most before returning over to the questions sure thanks so much those comments and and um and critiques were really really interesting um gondon that give me a lot to think about um i mean i'm really interested in what you're talking about in terms of you know this you know the age of revolutions uh you know finding continuities and correspondences between the first and the second ages of revolutions and i think the collaborative enterprise which we are undertaking over the next few days will allow us to do that hopefully and just to go back to your idea about small nations and and their their agency or otherwise i was really struck by what jessica rinich just talked about the agents of internationalism uh i know jessica is speaking over the next few days and i think that's something which my work is trying to address or has found really in terms of the archival evidence is that well well sony in moment as eras minella has defined it has really kind of um you know defined many of the debates around this period the post war period the research that i've been doing and others as well has really kind of given greater agency to those anti-colonial activists such as saza glue and gabriel danuncio and i think really what you suggested the modernization of communication is so important there it's actually the modes of anti-colonial activism which i'm really interested in and the republic of letters is entirely apt indeed a chapter which i'm writing writing is entitled the republic of letters based on that so we're on the same page so i think it's really important that when we assess the post war period in terms of critical junctures that we recognize that actually anti-colonial activists recognize this global moment on their own terms and also in their own times and while wilson wilson was so important and i think that they were self-actualized by a variety of ideological motivations and movements and just to point out that um uh an article which was published only yesterday in the american historical review called rethinking nationalism has spoken to some of these issues and and has addressed this idea of methodological cosmopolitanism so i think this discussion is is is very timely thank you and i want to ask jessica i'd see she at this point has a comment being being mentioned and being here in person okay and i saw a question from david thank you very much so i said two good questions i want to pick on you if you're talking about language so it seems like both these uh papers we've got issues we've got questions like nationalist movements here the questions of language is really important so the kathlan case in the irish case and they also have them involved in these kind of fan national um uh communicative networks and sources for example so kind of uh spanish language debates about well sodiumism which is spread to argentina which is kind of like things like that so i wonder if um both of them speak to say something a little bit about the practice concepts and how that worked right so on a very basic level when i have irish nationalist talking right into their Egyptian nationalist to uh kind of your ottoman figures in Berlin what language is it speaking in and what do they have to be concerned about the relationship you know english language was for spanish language and then the second question is about religion seems to be something else that may be against these two cases to go ahead and i'm particularly in these two cases obviously Catholicism and the Catholic church and perhaps maybe wonder about the role of religion generally in this kind of moment of kind of global revolution we kind of hold at this point and so obviously the irish nationalist case that's very important and then the kind of the kathlan case we you have kind of anti-clericalism as an important part of kathlan nationalism and that the violence that's happening in the baseload at the time and then obviously also this kind of religious dimension of the uh the rebellion case as well and the kind of spanish kathlamic churches are evolving and more of a clericalism and this idea of kind of that if it wasn't the kind of extension of the kind of the kathlamic register and so i wonder if this is a big trunk and i was wondering before i'll let our speakers respond and also to dr yalin's question is there any other question that we can oh that we can put in and and then it's still still finished with the north family boundaries yes jim one of the achievements of eris manila is in saying what matters is not what wilson thought but what people made of his ideas it's moving away from wilson i'd like to bring wilson a little bit back because it seems to me that both of the cases you talked about address the the tragedy of wilsonianism and that the core idea is democracy but the deep colonial movement is rarely towards democracy and many of those leaders of anti-colonial movements draw the democracy for autonomy for the freedom of whichever constitutive group you want one of the great exponents of the wilsonian moment was was muslim kamal he's not used in the musam i think wilsonianism can be an anti-democratic ideology and it unfortunately has remained so in many countries after they achieve their freedom is there any evidence in both of these cases that those who are insurrectionaries who want a revolution put democracy at the core uh and autonomy this is where as the uh follower or am i right that the democratic moment is is one that is more rhetorical in real one point by by george and another by laura and then we turn it over to speak it's okay i'm throwing a couple sorry a couple of things that the speakers can pick up on what they want to come back and continue discussing these why is taking the view from from jay's point about the wilsonian moment and money and i was just wondering uh uh i just want to flag it out because that's the second thing you talk about when one thinks about the anti-democracy in this sense why can't you uh you in your work find this interpretive model and whether that works for your cases or whether the scientific fairly wanted to comment on that and also to build on jay's point about democracy some of them are certainly in the other's paper i'm worried it must be uh expanding on that it's it's the kind of roles not taken there there's a big there about capital and federation regionally so you know how do these regions play out in that more early you know in i think this moment in the center highlighted there with which when you know when we're thinking about the reconfiguration or rather the changing of of you know the changing of forms of states and the final point to the exit you know navigation through the different connections i'm wondering i can speak forever i want now you know the irish pressure of the users of the template to discuss national questions from the mid 19th century on from the late 19th century on uh immediately so and within the different levels so level of activists level of of you know commentators even politicians etc i was wondering at this moment that if you see any connection where you find any connection that means say that with this case or you know people involved in this kind of iris happens you know the the way you kind of oppose this if there's any uh you know connections you find there in the area so that it's holding we you pick up on um i'll pick up on a couple of of these comments as well um these are both really interesting papers and when i i'm always a little bit skeptical about frameworks that present kind of belief in wilsonianism followed up by dissolution that um partly because the wilsonian vision you know may may indeed have democracy in its own but it's also kind of fundamentally incomplete in some ways you know that i i think that one of the reasons it is and you know that one of the reasons that it has this kind of one life is because it's because of that it's possible to kind of take what you want from it so i i guess i'm wondering whether this is not so much an idealism or he's got a blog as kind of an opportunity that fails right in this kind of space and then um right now i was wondering you know i'm struck by the specific connections and i think that we often have this idea about this kind of transnational frame of anti-colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism especially in this period that goes across different geographical frameworks but you know they're not they're not like the same right i mean zocalo is quite a conservative figure for instance within egyptian nationalism and i'm wondering in in particular your your your kind of articulation about the relationship with um with with teleplacias is is an indicator that sometimes you have to you know there are different nationalisms that are actively opposed to one another right so why in this period why why turkish rather than armenian right or why calisthenian versus scientist how how do how do these people decide who they will throw in their life right i mean how how are they how are these are these really just like happenstance kind of relationships do they have to do with language do they actually have to do with political sympathies because i think that you know um i don't know someone likes how cool it is presenting or but that is not a there they're not a lot of political there's not a lot of political overlap between the lap party and i think that except just in you know just in the frame of anti-colonialism but not much else so i'm just wondering if you could trace out a little bit what specificities are how one relationship takes precedence over another and whether there are alternatives kind of you know nationalist solidarity is not taken a quick point to take from the chart so if we want to see it it's sorry i'm gonna just uh uh there's some pushback in the chart about then to the point the reference to them to you know be an anti-colonial activist i just want to flag that scenario i think there are let's start with that if you could pick up on a few points to comment on sure there's a lot to get through there and these are really excellent questions again i wish i was there in person um to bring up just to address jay winter's discussion of the tragedy with zonianism i think your um your term of language is entirely appropriate wilson himself said that arlan was a great metaphysical tragedy of the day um in 1919 and i think he saw arland not only but all but you know as an excellent example of the scope and limitations of you know his arguments for self-determination and and how his version of you know the new liberal international order was translated into different contexts um and it was changed by by anti-colonial activists according to their own demands so i think it is a very capacious term with zonianism and um so um and just to take up another uh a couple of issues the issue of language i think is really fascinating and actually the idea really is that they're usually communicating obviously through english is the primary language but also through french and french is kind of the lingua franca of the cosmopolitanism of the day and if you look it's quite interesting to look at both the irish and egyptian submissions to the um to the um to the versi piece conference the similarities in language in which they you they they adopt which i think is more than a coincidence based on the the kind of collaborative work which stands for glul and shanty o kelly undertook and and shanty o kelly in his later memoir he writes a memoir about that glul in the 1930s and he talks about how they both had a passion for french for example so this is a very cosmopolitan enterprise going back to this issue of of language and communication i should also point out that irish nationalists were very interested in using esperanto at this period of time as a means of communicating their internationalist ambitions in 1919 to 1921 and so that was something else to keep in mind and i haven't noticed any particular references to greece within the official record but within newspapers for sure and they were very interested in what was taking place in greece and so that was kind of a key referent in 1921 1922 um just to address the final point which i think is really fascinating about how you know there are inequalities and certainly differences between the ideological basis of the various revolutionary movements which i alluded to i think that's entirely appropriate that you bring that issue up because really what i think to try and highlight in my paper is actually that despite those ideological differences it was actually the modes of communication the literary um the quality in many ways of the literary um articulations of their respective positions which allowed for solidalities so there are you know obviously obviously the idea of cosmopolitan thought zones where people are find themselves if this is like berlin side by side and that's what generates collaboration but there's also a real element of go back to this idea of the republic of letters an element of peer review and so you find this in actually some of the letters michael collins for example who's kind of the archetypal irish gunman you think not very intellectual is reviewing for example scottish nationalists um ideas of separating and independent scottish state and he decides whether to support them or otherwise on the merits of the literary materials which they submit and he writes to his colleague in london saying this is not of the same quality as our egyptian counterparts so there's an element of international revolutionary peer review 100 years ago you're going to read too soon rejection uh great note to end and don maxi miliano your input before we close this fascinating session that has really generated already so much more the very promising start maxi miliano thank you so much and and it's a pti i have i'm having i'm still having some problems with internet connection just a couple of questions i think it's it's working right now so let's go just a couple of issues on on on the question of democratization and on its link which is linked with idealism of wilsonism i think that that probably the main point regarding democratization is that uh in in most of the neutral countries but of course in spain and also in argentine and some countries of latin america uh the procession of wilson uh during the 1980 18 and 1918 and 1918 sorry uh is um is not very clear i mean uh the the main point to understand how the political the the political development in these countries is that uh the several groups that are fighting for power or are part of the political developments within these countries uh they built their own perceptions of wilson and they do so uh regarding uh other perceptions in other parts of the world so this is idealistic of course but it's also dialed in linked with political and political development so this this is why i underlined this question of idealism and democratization of course they they talk in spain about i mean liberal reformist socialists talk about democratization because most of the times they are thinking about democratization against liberalism what they think what the real uh i'm quoting the real liberalism so what what they think about uh uh uh uh liberalism that is uh in crisis also of course in spain but also in portugal in italy and and within this framework they built their own image of wilson and they do so just nationally thank you excellent one closing point by joe just very quickly especially i don't have political cartoons in this presentation and i wonder just you know if you're looking for common language and sort of transnational communication how much uh uh the use of in political cartoons different symbols are appropriate you know you almost compare images of wilson across different uh uh uh publications and texts um and and George you know i just suggested you may even draw on some of these for the final publication excellent well we are back on time and we need our coffee or tea and so we're going to give our audience a 15 minute big stop coffee stop and we connect back with you in about 15 minutes thank you very much and thank you to all speakers and contributors this has been fascinating bye-bye hi dimitris i'm marco are you hi hi how are you since we don't have the others i i speak i speak i speak from a hotel in Rome so i hope everything will work i mean i'm not really in an office so something for dessert but we will in case you have a problem maybe you can down your video maybe yeah this might help you can hear me fine yeah okay yes very well so you David are in uh you are in uh in Geneva yeah in Geneva yeah yeah actually i'm at home i think it was the only day i could stay at home and not go at the institute so no it's worth yeah i mean far away from duties in the office and everything is transparent that there are the residences there are all the doors everything is transparent so basically it's open door policy everybody enters violates your space when you're trying to work yeah it's it's impossible even worse in the middle of a conference so yeah since we are far away there is no way we can start without them can you imagine we can start a private session private session we can start the panel yeah i mean we have we have the panelists we have the chair so everything is exactly i might might be wrong i think the gabel is there yeah yeah right you're right i've seen him yeah in the room did you know each other yes we have met several times in these i mean post-absorg conferences so right there's been quite a few in the in the last years two years exactly by the way we i think we haven't met each other and i think so no i read one i've got one of your books i think adding institutes okay of course i know your books very well but i mean especially the first one is is it's something i'm i'm trying to to you know to to confront with in this research it's something i will speak about in the in the paper it can be sorry hello from the room because we're just in problem now and i'm sorry for the delay i'll just ask them to take the seat and then we'll get going okay thanks thanks you guys for their okay just give us one minute to get everybody thank you it's a typical coffee break yeah actually what what mark was saying i was thinking the same about your last book i mean when when you published it i was like okay now i need to figure out for what angle i'm going to take on that it's why that's the reason i do one thing and then i move on because i you just you just throw a challenge and then and i'm trying to respond it's a very coward thing you know no the book was great and thank you you're very very kind no no i really was honestly it's great and it gives the context the general context i really liked it yeah very very kind but i will do something different i'm done with my ternism if you see me publishing anything else on human ternism just come and keep my path never say never never say never true true but this is my intention at least my sincere genuine intention is to move on right okay welcome back so this is our session number three that runs from 345 to 515 entitled humanitarianism de-globalization and nationalism which are three terms that we don't see very often together and this is one of the reasons why i think this panel is going to be very interesting we have three distinguished panelists i'm going to introduce them immediately in order of appearance so we will start with Dimitris Camusis is a researcher at the Center for Asia Minor Studies in Athens he got his PhD at King's College London has been a scholar of the alexander on assist public benefit condition and coordinator of the research program greek soldiers war and trauma the asia minor campaign and the consequences of a painful experience funded by the research center for the humanities in greece this latest book is entitled greeks in turkey elite nationalism and minority politics in late ottoman and early republican istanbul which was published in 2021 then we have marco bruschani he is a associate professor at the department of political and social sciences at the university of florence he was postdoctoral fellow in many places school and bromales periore and pizza remark institutes resomble the center for advanced studies in rica etc his main research field is the political and intellectual history of itanian and european anti fascism and anti totalitarianism he published on justice liberda in 2017 and more recently has turned to the political and social history of fascism nationalism and conservatism and interwar european newspaper today's i think related to these new research interests of marco last but not least gabor and i think gabor is there in long time i saw him yeah who holds a phd from el te budapest is the director general at the institute of political history in budapest his research focuses on nationalism everyday ethnicity and politics of an entity more than eastern european history he is also the principal investigator of the erc consolidator project ne postrance which means negotiating post imperial transitions from real mobilization to nation state consolidation and they also think that perhaps our bits and pieces of this paper today are related to these interest surveys so we are going to start with the matrix the title of this paper is this problem is too big for Greece the nearest relief committee and the refugee crisis of 1922 the matrix the floor is yours thank you david for your kind introduction and for being our commentator today i would also like to thank the organizers the one advanced team georgian acopoulos and jo mayolo for this excellent event i wish also i was with you at my academic home i see faces familiar faces sir michael was there he was also in the committee of my phd but anyway under these unique hybrid online circumstances this is the best i could do for now um i would like to uh share before i start uh my screen uh with a power point one second right uh so um as david said uh the the title of my presentation is this problem is to be for Greece the nearest relief committee and the refugee crisis of 1922 now 1922 was a major turning point in modern greek history it was marked by the asian minor catastrophe of september 1922 a term used in greece to describe the defeat of the greek army in the greco-turkish war of 1919-1922 the burning of smirna and the atrocities committed against the non-muslim population of the city by the victorius kemales forces and the subsequent uprooting from the turkish coastline a near asian minor of approximately 1.3 million north of those Greeks who settled ultimately in greece uh this violent displacement was made official by the convention concerning the exchange of greek and turkish populations on the tweak of lozan both signed at the swiss city on 30 january and 24 july 1923 respectively under the same international agreements roughly 350 000 muslims mainly from macedonia and frays were forced to migrate to turkey now when these refugees arrived in greece the country was utterly unable to deal with insurmountable problems of feeding sheltering and providing medical assistance to this massive displaced population taking as a as a case study the nearest relief committee a non-governmental humanitarian organization founded in new york in 1915 my contribution will try to highlight the significant aspect of the interwar greek refugee crisis namely western humanitarian aid towards the destitute sick malnourished and in many cases unaccompanied and orphaned refugee children during the first years of their presence in greece in this context it will assess the humanitarian campaign carried out by the nr which had at its main purpose to identify officially uh the violent displacement of 1922 as an international humanitarian crisis transmit the pain of others and raise awareness in american society and collect funds supplies and medical assistance to address this issue building on the recently published work of david erodogno emphasis would be placed on the nr publications and the reports of his representative's increase with regards to the problems both of survival and social integration that these underage refugees from asia minor had to face now it should be pointed out from the outset that humanitarian organizations are highly selective regarding their aims and the direction of their activities not all wars national disasters famines displacements and diseases turn into international humanitarian causes on the contrary there is a process that can be roughly divided into three main phases during the first phase an event is identified as a humanitarian crisis during the second a strategy is put into place in order to address this crisis and during the third humanitarian organizations monitor and assess the results of their efforts adjusting them accordingly in all these three phases publications photographs and field reports of the personnel in seru i mean doctors nurses paramedics volunteers social workers educators bureaucrats and others play an essential part because they offer valuable information on a wide range of issues such as living conditions needs with regards to food medicines including population statistics relations with the state authorities and responses of the local society all of which form the basis of a humanitarian operation focusing on informing the international community and practically dealing with a humanitarian emergency the asia minor catastrophe of 1922 was no exception on the contrary it constitutes a representative example of an international response to one of the first major refugee crisis of the 20th century as soon as the asia minor front collapsed and the greek army started evacuating the region the nr and the american red cross personnel stationed in turkey in greece began to monitor and survey the refugee crisis in the near east the scale of the crisis resulted in the immediate endorsement of the effort for the relief and rehabilitation of the asia minor greeks by the major humanitarian organizations of the time the nr had already incorporated greece into its own going the shall not perish campaign which also covered armenia syria and persia modern day iran and had as it's called the collection of 30 million dollars for the needs of the refugees in the region in october 1922 the nr published a pamphlet with the title the cable story of the nearest relief on the job at smirna which was composed of extracts of cablegrams received from the organization staff from smirna konstantinople rovosto the salonik and other places in the area of distress according to the message of the general secretary of the nr charles victory the pamphlet was addressed and i quote to the many friends who are helping or who desire to help to relieve the indescribable suffering among the refugees cast adrift by the smirna disaster at the same time victory communicating dr. taco williams journalist educator and a member of the national board of trustees of the nr a series of cables describing the refugee situation in greece all of them stressed the inability of the greek state to deal effectively with this massive influx of people the main argument was that if the nr as well as other western humanitarian organizations did not step in immediately thousands of refugee children would die of hunger cold and diseases within a short period of time after their arrival in greece according to an estimate of the nr the numbers of the refugees in early october 1922 where as follows 150 000 in mitilini 50 000 in hyos and samos 10 000 in other eegean islands 75 000 in tesalomiki 30 000 in athens and pireus 125 000 in rovosto and 30 000 in the mastodonian coast our reger who set up the nr personnel services bureau in athens and pireus reported that the local officials and people had no realization of the seriousness of conditions which were certain to follow sanitary neglect at the places where the refugees had been concentrated he added and i quote that the refugee problem is growing more serious everywhere and it will be impossible for the greek government to handle it adequately without outside help the situation was equally critical in mitilini and the other greek islands lex william cludes who visited the islands observed that unless more funds and supplies were immediately put at the disposal of the relief committee thousands of refugees would perish before thanksgiving due to the worsening of the weather as he emphasized in a laconic manner flower flower flower blankets clothes urgently needed women and children comprised the most vulnerable group amongst the refugees in late november 1922 luther fowl a prominent member of the nr communicated to vikri etai britain report on the dire situation of the women and children refugees in athens and pireus according to the report the death rate of babies in pireus was 180 per day and three of the largest refugee camps were under quarantine for smallpox while the percentage of such winter illnesses as influenza and pneumonia among women and children in the camps exceeded 50 percent the words of dr. mabel eliot of the american women's hospital constituted a desperate plea and i quote the health situation in the big refugee centers is rapidly assuming the status of a catastrophe there is a more the most urgent need of one million blankets in greece today there is equally urgent need for warm clothing and for warm heat giving food not one woman or baby in a thousand has had milk for the past week half of them are getting less than a quarter of a pound of bread daily you must repeat again that this problem is too big for greece the whole world must help and not merely with those leadership is needed as much as money i believe near its relief must take up the problem of these refugee children what of thousands are orphans i cannot hope to survive the winter except through american aid abnormal everyday life shutter families difficulties with social integration scarcity of work lack of schooling and proper education but also some of the acute problems that the representatives of western humanitarian organizations witnessed and reported to their headquarters the accounts of the anr personnel from different cities of greece during this early period are indicative of the severity of these issues shalls victory wrote in february 9 23 i saw nearly a thousand boys recently arrived from point to see in asia and i was sleeping on the floors of the zappian exposition hall in athens i saw 400 girls safe from turkey suppression occupying the royal palace facing constitution square in the heart of athens i saw 67 girls all of them suffering from conjunctivitis tried into one room 20 by 20 fit in size a cold rain falling outside with no other place of a boat eating sleeping working or playing night or day in my vision i saw my own great rich america clothing purple and fine linen fairing substantially every day enjoying comforts luxuries wealth transcending the dreams of the ancients surpassing anything that the world has ever known and which no american can appreciate until he has walked through the refugee camps in the land of the stocking death again brainhead salmon in october 1923 on october first the total number of fatherless refugee children 14 years old or less was estimated at 200 000 of these 75 000 were also motherless these figures do not include orphans under the care of the nearest relief nor the fatherless children of grief itself only the refugees the number of orphans is increased is increasing daily owing to the death of mothers weakened by exposure and lack of proper nourishment and also the last one the greek refugees of salonica now june in june 24 in june 1924 number about 75 000 conditions were so demoralized at the time of my visit in february that because of the cold and suffering school activities were hardly to be thought of at Athens where the greek refugee camps are in better shape than elsewhere school buildings are being erected in the permanent camps in the temporary camps only the most rudimentary provisions were made the estimates i have from reliable workers on the ground are that 100 000 are in need of supplementary clothing food and educational facilities despite these adverse practical and social circumstances the n er as well as other american and british organizations rose to the challenge and carried almost single-handedly the load of humanitarian aid during the initial stage of the refugees arrival in greece thus paving the way for the subsequent official settlement rehabilitation and incorporation to local greek society and the national body of the country a difficult task implementing eventually by the refugee settlement commission under the auspices of the league of nations to be more specific the n er was responsible for the safe transport of 15 644 orphans from asia minor and istanbul to greece and replacement along 2327 orphan children discovered later in several refugee settlements into orphanages established by the organization in Athens the salon mickey porfu kefalonia syros thassos porin futraki edipsos halkida noropos until 1930 the n er in collaboration with the arc and the american women's hospital treated approximately 18 000 orphans in 39 hospitals established all over greece the children's hospital hosted at the n er orphanage for boys in the zapion building in athens which was also equipped with a dental and radiology clinic and a microbiology laboratory carried out a program of vaccinations and treated such diseases as tuberculosis and trachoma therefore from 1923 until 1925 the mortality rate in the n er orphans as well as the number of orphans with trachoma was significantly reduced the n er also provided these children with basic and professional education offered scholarships for studies in greek institutions or american schools such as the athens college or anatholia college in the salon mickey facilitated the reunification of refugee families and the adoption of children and distributed foods and close to thousands of refugees overall it can be safely argued that as far as the aspect of international history of humanitarianism is concerned the asian manna catastrophe and the interwar refugee crisis was not a unique phenomenon instead it should be examined within the wider framework of work of wars uh violent displacements and humanitarian emergencies as well as the response to these emergencies through the development of non-governmental organizations and the evolution of humanitarian strategies and aid delivery methods in this context the substantially relieved work carried out by the n er immediately after the uprooting of the asian manna Greeks in 1922 is an enduring historical reminder of addressing a massive refugee crisis similar to the one taking place in the same region a century later thank you thank you very much Dimitri thank you and we can move to the second as we are going to follow exactly the same format so we're going to to listen to Marco Bresciani the title of his presentation is de-globalization post-Habsburg pesta and de-globalization under fascist conditions Marco yes thank you very much Davide thank you for the kind introduction and first of all thank you to all the organizers for this wonderful event I'm really sorry not to be able in London I speak to you from a hotel room in room so I hope everything will work and you can listen to me so I will try to share my screen with a PowerPoint presentation here it is as Davide said this paper is a presentation of a research in progress aiming to connect the European history of fascism global history history of the continental empires with special regard to the absolute empire I don't know if the presentation is working it is okay it's a bit small but it's readable yeah I would like to maybe this is better okay so in order to connect them I focus on post-Habsburg one of the first settings of the rise of the fascist movement after the great war as agreed I will briefly sketch the main problems of the research and I will especially emphasize some additional references concerning the relationship of fascism to the eastern Mediterranean sea and Anatolia in particular references which will be integrated in the final version of the paper to understand this relationship we have to consider is a background that Italy had crucially contributed towards setting in motion the international dynamic that was to lead Europe into the long great war from October 1911 onwards as a matter of fact what is often described as the war of Libya contributed and constituted a severe blow to the Ottoman Empire paving the way for the Balkan wars and creating the preconditions for the crisis of July 1914 the conquest of roads and of the the Canis islands pushed the Italian imperial projects toward the Ottoman lands and after the fall of the Ottoman Empire fostered its geopolitical ambitions in the region at the same time the Italian military victory in 1918 offered a significant contribution in defeating and disintegrating the absolute empire opening up to what was perceived as a power vacuum in central Europe where Italy could conceive and play a new international role. One of the protagonists of the global 1922 that is the founder and leader of the fascist movement Benito Mussolini was aware of the European and global connections of the ongoing Oswald crisis and advocated a prominent role for Italy in this crisis itself. In an important speech at the Prieste in February 1921 Mussolini explained that the war had provoked a gigantic shift of global powers from London to New York and from the Atlantic to the Pacific as you can read. Accordingly we can argue that in his mind the post-1919 period was not a period of deglobalization but a period of new globalization with shifting drivers and centers implying the crisis of Europe and notably of central Europe. This narrative of European decline was understood as a way for legitimizing the new role of fascists in the global post-war period and context. According to Mussolini Italy was placed between west and east and its policy had to play a pivotal role in the east considered as Italy's quote a natural magnificent field of economic and intellectual expansion and of quote. Over the year 1922 Mussolini often spoke about the situation in the eastern Mediterranean Sea referring especially to the dangers as well as to the opportunities that turmoil in the former Ottoman lands implied. He especially looked at the transformations in Egypt as he was conceived that the decline of the English hegemony might open the road to a new Italian policy in the Mediterranean Sea and especially in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. In his most important essay on the issue published in September 1922 Mussolini appreciated the victory of Kemal Pasha and included among the most important results of his military action quote the breakdown of the great imperialism in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. At the same time Mussolini was in favor of a policy of peace and alliance with Kemal's new Turkey as it could work quote as a link of juncture between the European world and the Asian world and of quote. One month later in October 1922 just on the eve of the March on Rome Mussolini reiterated on his own newspaper El Popolo d'Italia Italian people that the Italian interest was to support Kemal and to contribute to demolish the British empire. In a speech to the Italian parliament in the following February devoted to the foreign affairs Mussolini now had of the government claimed that the foreign policy of fascism quote in that historical moment could not be but extremely cautious and at the same time strongly active as Mussolini himself intended to privilege the effort of political and economic reconstruction after the great war. These ideas particularly resonated in the Northern Adriatic where Mussolini delivered several important speeches between 1919 and 1922 but they were anything but exclusive to Mussolini himself and they broadly circulated in the environment of early fascism. Local nationalists and fascists from Trieste associated the conquest of the Adriatic area to the construction of a Mediterranean empire and in doing so led the foundations for the new imperial policy of fascist Italy. Some articles published in the local fascist newspaper Popolo di Trieste in June 1921 by Michele Rizzolo a prominent literary critique and fascist activist focused on the fascist attitudes, conceptions and strategies towards the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Rizzolo was convinced that the definitive solution of the Adriatic question would depend on the future situation of Italy in the Mediterranean Eastern Mediterranean Sea which in turn would affect the overall political settlement in the Balkans. In his view the problem of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea ultimately coincided with the problem of Trieste which constituted quote the most important port connecting the main trade lines between Central Europe and the East and represented the natural course of the Italian commercial industrial expansion in the Danubian and Balkan hinterland as well as the immediate connection with Anatolia as a land of potential economic exploitation for Italy. On a complementary note the journalist and historian from Trieste Attilio Tamero argued that the question of Dalmatia far from being a mere problem of irredentism or nationality was quote a vast strategic problem extending from the Adriatic into the Mediterranean and on which the global political independence and freedom of Italy itself depended. The fascist discourse echoed the pre-war Italian nationalism imperialism which had aimed at establishing Italy's imperial power through the conquest of Trento and Trieste and the surrounding territories such as Istria and Danesia or even further I feel as far as Anatolia. However we have to consider that in a situation of international instability and the redrawing of state borders in post-absorbing Europe there was a growing likelihood that the territorial aspirations of Italian nationalism fascists would be achieved in the near future. On the other hand we have to keep in mind that the collapse of the absolute empire marked the end of the largest supermarket area in Europe in 1918 the disintegration of the absolute institutions did anything but continuing radicalizing in the post-war period the push to fragmentation and the globalization which was underway already in the wartime period. The port of Trieste is a hub of activities and connections between the Mediterranean Sea and Eastern Central Europe was particularly affected by the wartime slump and by the following annexation to the Italians in 1919. A partial recovery of the port activities of Trieste took place over the 1920s but the collapse of the absolute empire had undermined the unique commercial position of the upper reactive town. As you can see the volume of trade exchanges and the breadth of the global networks did not reach the same level as in 1913 at least for the first years of the post-war period. As a consequence the Italian-speaking local elites had to cope with a completely unexpected situation of economic decline and to strive for the reconstruction of the connections of the northern Adriatic town with the exiled to Interland, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Accordingly the post-1918 local elites barbantly discussed as far as regarding the reconfiguration of the connections between the port of Trieste and Eastern Central and South Eastern Europe as well as the reconstruction of the economic and commercial activities in the 1920s. Notably Fulvia-Suvić another important local nationalist, then fascist established a direct link between the impending decline of the port of Trieste and the much needed search for a new role of the Adriatic port in the future order. Interestingly Suvić became a leading manager of the Francesco Parisi that is the first and oldest shipping company serving all the absolute central Europe and beyond. In the post-1918 period the management of the Parisi company quickly switched its loyalty for the absolute good Italian state and it tried to consolidate its ties with the commercial routes to Venice, Florence, Milan and Rome. At the same time it struggled to reactivate and mobilize new networks in the success of states and to resume its critical importance in the friendly connections with Central Europe. In this regard Suvić played a crucial role within this context and contributed to the projects of commercial and cultural re-globalization of Trieste as a way of establishing a new role of the fascist of fascist Italy in Central and Balkan Europe as well as in the Adriatic and Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Meanwhile the local elite from Trieste promoted new ties with the success of states in order to reconstruct a sort of economic unity in Central Europe and within it to accept the primacy of the Italian interest. For instance, Aminio Bruna was a friend to Suvić, an active member of the chamber of commerce of Trieste and part of an ancient business family who came from Feralbe and was especially busy with cotton and coffee global trade. Bruna played a major role both in the formation of the local public opinion about economic issues in post-1918 Trieste and in the reorganization of the fragmented post-war Central Europe and its connections. In this regard he published an important article among others on the local twisty newspaper in Pico in September 1922. Bruna was convinced that Trieste, thanks to its important function for the countries of its Interland, constituted as a series of independent states, might attain a special position in the Italian economy within the new international settlement established by the treaties of Saint-Germain and Trinone. To Bruna it was possible to enlarge the customs territory of Italy and its fear of action in any economic field by creating, quote, a customs union with the several small economies which emerged from the territories of the former monarchy in the aftermath of the peace treaties, end of quote. Bruna delivered the speech in November 1923 at the Congress of the Cycle of Economic Studies in Trieste with the major representatives of the national economic life. Bruna argued that the military success the Italians had obtained in 1918, quote, by crushing down the dynastic political system of the upskirts should be complemented by the economic victory which could decisively assert Italian influence on the Nanubian world, end of quote. With supporting the local and national asset of the fascist movement, Bruna was thus in favor of the establishment of Trieste as a free port and of the recovery of a free trade zone in Central Europe through the restoration of the gold standard system. To briefly conclude, now you can see a map of the late 20s of this project of reconnecting with border European global trade networks. So to briefly conclude, I would like to draw some more general remarks. The reflections and debates of the Triestean political and economic nationalists and fascist elites demonstrate how the disintegration of the Hungary and the subsequent fragmentation of the its imperial free trade zone shaped the need for a new combination of economic liberalism and political authoritarianism. Before mentioned, Risolo, Tamaro, Suvic and Bruna were in different ways aware of the structural limits of the nation state and of the need to reactivate regional and global trade networks across Italian interests in Central and Balkan Europe as well as in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and in Anatolia and even beyond. They struggled to reconfigure the legacy of globalizing Habsburg Trieste and to negotiate to establish new forms of globalization under fascist conditions, including economic, political, cultural and ultimate military projects of imperial expansion. As I tried to demonstrate, the ideas of the nationalists and fascists from Trieste had a significant impact on Mussolini in his attempt of reconceptualizing and reorganizing the new global order in the 20s, intertwining economic liberalism, political authoritarianism, as well as economic, cultural and military forms of imperialism. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Marco. And also thank you for keeping the time and we're going to move to Gabo. I think he's in the room. The title of his presentation is When Imperialists Join the Nationalists Against the West, Post-Imperial Business Networks and the Creation of National Economies in the Habsburg Post-Imperial Economic Space in the 1920s. Gabo, we can hardly hear you online at least. I didn't start. We are struggling with climate change, with me in the spotlight. Hopefully it will react. There's something automatic which directs the cameras. So, first of all, I would like to thank the organizers, especially making me this leap from a localist to a globalist, because as David mentioned, this work, which is also very much in progress, has grown out of the research I devoted to the southern Banat small region within the new Romania, where actually very important imperial businesses had local branches or factories. And I was interested in how these local branches of imperial capitalist networks or companies, conglomerates, survived and fared in inter-Romania, which was supposedly trying to take over control of these supposedly enemy property, and especially industry that was very important for the new Romanian state. And after taking it to a comparison with what happened in the post-autonomous space with the assets of one of the important actors within this business network, the Peshti-Hungary Conversion Bank, or Opialic, it was just called Peshti in Hungary. 1922 seemed to be or turned out to be a kind of interesting turning point. Early in the year, the so-called Orient Gruppe, which was set up by Eastern Hungarian banks in 1916, sailed to the last of its assets, held in the Ottoman state, the plans of the execution plans of the new port facilities in Istanbul. And this was the year when the Romanian National Bank rejected a reorganization idea of the branches of the Peshti-Hungary Conversion Bank in Transylvania that came under Romanian rule. And this was very important for the bank in a way of salvaging its assets and property. So seemingly, the result was the same kind of very serious situation. And still the consequences were very different in post-autonomous Turkey, the bank and its business partners decided to exit Turkey and liquidate their assets. But in Romania, after a retrenchment, a new bloom came and the bank and its partners were actually involved in new business corporations with Romanian capital, which led to the establishment of several significant and monopolistic positions on the new Romanian market. This part of the story is actually very well covered by a forthcoming group written by Matteo Vigo, who compares Azers-Lorraine and Transylvania in terms of this economic transition. And I rather will add to this picture that paints something about the broader regional south-eastern European issues, and less about the concrete process of salvaging capital. So my basic argument is that when we see this kind of resilience of post-Rangarian economic space in south-eastern Europe, at least economic space that is comparable to the export empire of Germany, even though it's rested on different foundations and had not that broad eastern, is that this kind of survival, if it happened, meant a new integration but also a reintegration of the economic space within which these traditional actors had their crucial position. And this was based on mutual benefits, one can even claim that there was interest in the moral economy of the high capital. In Romania, this survival of resistance rested on a more organic expansion into the Romanian economic space by the Ottoman what happened in the Ottoman Empire was more politics-driven and past year, but also to a certain extent much less developed for political considerations as actually for the assessment of the political situation of the Ottoman Empire and the first work by these or from the side of these capitalist elites. And in the realignment after 1918, at least in both cases exemplified although differently, local alliances against more power from western competition played a role and I will just try to give a few examples. So speaking of Romania, which was an exemplary case of gradual expansion, the most important moment for Pesci was 1904 when with three other banks, two other banks with the German bank and the Austrian bank, it transformed the family bank, the Marmotschek plant, Kolokia Blancbanka into a shared company from a private bank. The Blancbanka became one of the five largest relief banks before 1st of four and Pesci was its closest collaborator among its external partners. It was practically the one that had the most important influence on its business policies, but it also meant that the kind of mutual trust was developed between the Romanian owners and the foreign managers and the Pesci's representative on board. Although during the first world war there were tensions about the future and Pesci invested a lot of social capital into salvaging the Romanian owners of the bank because it had something to operate on the German, Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ottoman occupation and it was not so easy and Pesci moved all kinds of stones in Berlin and Vienna to achieve it. It again was a very significant and important for what happened after 2080. With the Romanian annexation of Eastern Hungary, a new complication emerged and nevertheless for Hungarian businessmen it was also a new opening and already in 1919 there were plans to somehow create a uniform economic block or space between Romania and Hungary, whatever its boundaries were to come. And within these new configurations many revolved around the participation of Blanbanca which was still actually owned by Pesci as well. So a kind of typical way of salvaging property was developed. Romanian capitalists or Romanian business groups bought the assets of the Austro-Hungarian owners through the establishment of new shareholder companies and for a long time they established also syndicate and shared the profits. Curiously with all kind of interesting business machinations the Austro-Hungarians could take most of the profit even though the proportion of the shares was equal between the Romanian and external partners in that case and these new companies actually would establish monopolies like on the steel machinery and railway carriage industries, these Southern-Banat factories played a very important role in the creation of a new monopolistic company, the Tita-Nedraka line in Romania. But it was true for the textile industry and for several others and Pesci could also salvage its branches with the cooperation of Blanbanca and a few other interested Romanian institutions. Regarding the Ottoman Empire although there were ideas before the First World War during the First and Second Balkans War that promoted some kind of expansion towards the Ottoman space and Pesci or at least chairman of the Pesci was one of the most prominent proponents of these ideas. The most significant moment was October 1916 when four banks, two from Hungary, two from Austria established a so-called Korean group, the goal of the main aim of which was actually to land 240 million to the Ottoman government out of which the Ottomans could buy import goods from those 300. Nevertheless if it was established they also started to look and not independently from the political pressure from the government exploring potential businesses with looking for the possible and rather instead of looking for the war and therefore they were very cautious with accepting proposals they tried to avoid all the court wire emerging both of the local incentives and political conflicts which in which they were thrown into or even blackmailed and they had to face this kind of Ottoman policy of which was exemplified by at least he's the one who surfaces very much in the documents, Kemal Bey who tried to invite these Austro-Hungarian companies into establishing Ottoman-Austro-Hungarian common business enterprises with majority share provided for the Ottomans and also the major profits provided for the Ottomans. The basic idea was to somehow help the emergence of a new Ottoman business elite at the cost of the foreigners and also facilitating transfer of no rule as well. And there were two cases when they were rather serious these were the exploratory drills in the Bosphorus for a bridge but then they decided it was impossible to build on the basis of these explorations and the Yelikapu that became the flagship project not surprisingly the Oriental Ban which had its rarely tracks nearby was also involved and the Oriental Ban was the company that actually built the plans of the Yelikapu so in a sense it remained within this group but nevertheless it soon became quite clear that it was impossible to for these companies to build and after 1918 it was quite clear for them that liquidation was inevitable even though they tried to salvage for a while. So again coming to some kind of open conclusions for debate and for further development along several lives that are possible it's very important to see and I think that here my case connects with neurozones that these imperial economic spaces were not just dissolved rather they were persistent and sometimes it does not necessarily the moving of people within the space but rather the capital goods and specialists so to say so managers and specialists who were who were very important for the business if it worked this space was possible to be relatively intact it also helped through a reconfiguration which is the more global aspect of this story I was not tackling here to save the relatively important and focal positions of Budapest and Vienna not necessarily the centers but at least the gateways to the region for testing and this is the most striking feature of it especially in the Romanian case these new configurations of partner monopolies were developed not just simply as a kind of alliance of two business groups who were actually cooperating for a long time very much before the First World War but at least justified towards politics which was very important for making the decisions as a way of creating new alliances against those western powers who dominate or who are perceived as seeking economic dominance in this region and as the Romanian government at least the Romanian government that came to power in 1922 had this very strange political colors of being the liberal and promoting and protectionist economic policy they were actually very receptive for this kind of argumentation and it's not a coincidence that the Blanc Banco was supposed to be the closest business company in Romania to the liberal political elite so this way we can even see how the network itself connected with politics and helped all of the members of this network which were still operative in the South-East and European economic space to preserve most of its assets in in a sense recreating it because it doesn't mean that there weren't changes within the network but it remained operative and defining economic realities of the area. Thank you very much Gabor thank you I will open the floor in a few minutes I would like to make a few comments maybe if we can stop sharing the screen so that I can see also the others fantastic and we have 30 34 35 minutes for a discussion so I don't want to sound too banal or trivial but listening to these three papers I had a novel in mind I thought about what I'm Pamuk my name is Red which is the story of a murder at the court of the sultan in the 15th century if I'm not wrong and if you if you replace the murder with and the inquiry on the assassins with 1922 well you will see that 1922 has very different faces and we go from exhaustion and catastrophe to and I will start with Gabor opportunity this is how we opened his talk he said 1922 is a year of opportunity and this granular analysis is extremely interesting to me because it shows not really the persistence of the old regime to quote a very well-known book but something else which is precisely continuities and if there is not a very strong ideological reasons why things have to be replaced there is a way of accommodate oneself or a line of business in this particular case the banks with their interests and there is no utter rejection of the past this is and I'm not at all surprised if Gabor uses the term reconfiguration in his talk which makes a lot of sense to me so this was this was my first reflection now if we continue backwards and we go back to Marco well if this is a reconfiguration in the case of Trieste this is an extremely radical one and this is about replacing an old empire with a new empire which is probably even more rapacious than than the previous one and this is the plan that the fascist have which is delusional for sure but place is an awful lot of importance on precisely Trieste and there is yet another word that Marco has not used but of course it is it is there and Gabor used which is gateway Trieste is this gateway it's not the center of the empire but is an extremely important note of this future fascist empire once again the fascist as I have always argued in my research lacked an awful lot of creativity they wanted simply to replace what Trieste had been with a new Trieste that would have played exactly the same role in exactly the same areas and even the idea of an Adriatic empire was not particularly new and as Marco pointed out it came from a nationalist tradition that was there long before the fascist came and Jay remembered the case of Corfu and of course Marco referred to Anatolia and in the geopolitical imaginary of the fascist race was always there as a land that should have been conquered by the fascists that's that's that that was the plan the delusional plan there is another word that come to my mind that we might reflect on which is allegiance and the story of the sewage of the runner of the tamaro and all the others that were mentioned in the paper is a story of the winners because there were other people in Trieste that were not particularly happy to see the canyons and the fascist winning over and fundamentally erasing the Austro-Hungarian past in in order to to create this a new axis of civilization that was in the quotes by Benito Mussolini and that will conclude with a few words on Dimitris and what is fascinating about the Near East Relief story is that the Greeks themselves are nowhere to be seen in the documents of the Near East Relief the refugees are statues they are objects they are certainly not their fate in their hands because the Near East Relief in a very civilizational way is going to give them a future and the quote by Paul Monroe which is a very controversial figure that would deserve to be studied way more is precisely that and it's something that he said which struck me because I think exactly like he does humanitarianism extremely selective and if children are picked up by the Near East Relief it might be for humanitarian reasons but it might also be for other political reasons that of course I never mentioned in the documents that one can find in several archives so I will conclude throwing at you two more words sovereignty which was not very often used in your three papers and was quite surprised and hostages and this probably refer more to Dimitris paper I will stop here and I will ask the three panelists to very briefly react to my provocations and and then we will open up the floor thank you Dimitris shall we start with you or Gabor one of the two remind I can Dimitris oh god uh yes well uh I start with uh with the more specific comments that you made on on my paper the Greeks are nowhere to be seen this is true and I think this is also something you've highlighted in your work but I think this is also where I would like to turn this research I would like to see the response from the Greek sources so in a sense see how the recipients of that aid responded both to the to the aid the actual aid like the medication close and so on that reached Greece but also to the policies of the NER which I'm positive that it would be different in terms of criteria I mean if the criteria of the NER are civilizational as you correctly mentioned well in the case of the Greek state and of the Greek refugees is an issue of survival in the case of the Greek state of political survival and in the case of the Greek refugee survival uh period um with regards to uh with regards to your point about children this is this is very true when when we see their the approach from from the NER point of view there if they have this kind of civilizational uh background that the west is going to uh disseminate the light of civilization in in the east and so on uh therefore children yes are um let's say are a population that is easier to mold in that kind of of of idea but at the same time I feel that the the responses and the reports of the people who work in the field show something beyond that I think yes there might be a civilizational background if we see in a very critical uh from a very critical aspect let's say but at the same time I think that they are actually moved by what they witness uh in Greece during this first month or this first couple of years of the presence of the refugees and I think this is also something that needs to be highlighted I mean the the actual wording of of these reports which in a sense will bring a kind of balance I feel with with your work in terms of the criteria and the and the politics behind uh the the NER um the the issue of sovereignty and hostages yes I mean Greece as I mentioned in the paper and I think this is also something you've you've worked on um was unable to do anything at the time I mean Greece is is helpless and this is why also which to connect the big with the financial leg of of that effort uh and the reconfiguration we should not forget that uh later on the refugee settlement commission uh and to establish the refugee settlement commission Greece receives two loans with the very difficult terms and to a certain extent these loans uh compared to the financial crisis of the 1930s result of the to the bankruptcy of Greece so therefore yes there is an issue there a political issue of sovereignty and lack of and also an issue of of financial dependence um so last last point you mentioned the word reconfiguration I think that uh there is a there are there is a there are two sides of a configuration after 1922-1923 in Greece there is a reconfiguration of the state because it it receives 1.3 million people to a population of five million so we understand that there is a massive influx of people that need to be incorporated into the Greek society so that that is a major reconfiguration in all aspects social economic political and so on but also it's the reconfiguration that you are looking in your book also how the west now gets a prominent role uh it comes to play a prominent role through its institutions whether it's non-governmental through the NER that say the children fund and so on or the League of Nations through the refugee settlement commission so I think there is also a sense of of of a great reconfiguration along these lines in Greece in the 20s and the and the 30s this is my my brief response thank you I will address another one that you received on the Q&A but I would like to turn the floor to Marco and to table first Marco yes thank you very much David these were really challenging comments in some sense I will think over them in the in the next steps of the of the research yes sure I think I mean only one and I think you are completely right I think that there is a kind of radical reconfiguration of the order built around Prieste its economic function and the meaning of the political annexation what I'm trying to do is to you know to rethink of the imperial projects of the fascist movement and the regime through the you know the the influence of the absolute legacies so to try to to to connect the imperial achievements of the 30s early 40s to this longer background on the one hand on the other end I try to connect these imperial projects with the local culture of the both political and economic elites and in this regard I think that sure they they on the one hand they felt as winners on the on the war but on the other hand they felt as losers of the of the war and these mixed feelings I think played a critical role in the early post-war period because differently from other regions they really felt affected by the negative backlash of the annexation so there is a kind of interesting debates and discussion between the local elites and the new national authorities for instance in as far as regards the resettlement of the railway connections the politics of tariffs and customs the relationship in general with the success of states and in this regard I think that the local elites felt you know divided between feelings of victory and feelings of defeat in a sense and here I come to the the problem of serenity because I think that I didn't mention the term but I mean I'm also working on issues related to the term and I think that the you know the the establishment the reconnection the refrigeration of the area in economic terms had also something to do with the definition of serenity the in national authorities look at the problem of interest just in terms of political serenity so they wanted just to fix the new borders and guarantee the new territorial acquisitions on the other end of the local elite think so in terms of economic serenity and this pushed them encouraged them to retrieve and reconnect with the other regions of the empire yes last but not least I think that this replacement of empires has a lot to do with this new you know the new reflection of the absolute studies related to the impossibility of really separating nationalism and imperialism and in this sense I think the fascists were heirs of a longer tradition and at some time operated a very different context so this made their plans maybe delusional but very dangerous for a long time thank you thank you Marco Gabor thank you very much I'm going to stop picking up sovereignty because I think they can like some of the other times as well and once the one thing what I'm tempted to say but I don't have so far proof is that this kind of reassession of sovereignty that this capitalist experience after 1916 when they were pushing towards some kind of expansion all right as they go with the penetration of the empire proved to be a very important experience for them to deal with the reassession of sovereignty by the media among different circumstances but sometimes facing the same demands and the same same framework in the sense so we just in a sense a kind of preparation of what happened with them and they could have nevertheless their solution was mostly that kind of local integration they started to do it in the Ottoman Empire they hired people who were living and operating in Constantinople for decades some one of them was even among the leaders of the debt league so he definitely had some kind of intimate knowledge of development finances they started to cooperate with the great national command which was actually chaired by the Austrian-Citizen Viktor Reier so they tried to build the same connections but they didn't have the time and they also found that they are somehow dragged into dubious what actually dragged into very dubious business and he was by the local elite as well local but there is also an interesting continuity regarding the sovereignty of the empire that they saw that it's quite different from the document that they saw that this is just a temporary issue that there is a temporary movement and they can somehow build something because by the end of the war everything will return to how it was in 1914 the British and the French will return and they'll have quite significant influence on the Ottoman Empire and this is something that again contributed to why the debt league really restrained the regarding jumping on full kind of ideas and in a sense they were right but I don't think they did also the collapse of their own empire yes one can even think at least metaphorically of kind of hostage situations with dealing with the sovereign that they at least in Romania quite well managed and also an interesting feature of looking at this story through the lens of sovereignty how much the end of the story or this kind of restart of the story around 1922-1923 at least in Romania in the Central Europe was based on seeing the external limitations of the sovereign empire so internationalist solution for the economic problems the intervention of the legal nation which was also at least as Nathan Marcus are regarding the Austrian reconstruction was a means and means for the national elites to reassert this sovereignty because they could engage in an interesting game with the access from the legal nation who pretended to be actually the directing the process while they had much less leverage than they communicated it the outside world so this is this would be again an interesting story to be so ready thank you Gabor I've got two questions and one hand I will start with Lukas continue with Lina and then with Panagiotis so Lukas has a question for Dimitris and I'm going to read it where their distinctions made by the humanitarian organizations between the refugees according to their geographical origins and or language spoken ethnicity and by this he means where they providing the same aid to all refugees or where they for instance giving the priority to Spermios or Pontics or the Armenians right well yes and no with the case of the Armenians we know that the NER had a special interest in them they had already been involved from very early this is also basically this is the that was why the initiative of the NER of the establishment when you are was made in 1915 therefore they were the ones who took care of of the Armenian refugees we know for example Dorothea Saturn who was while they would be at the last year of she was in Constantinople she was attending the Armenian internal refugees outside Constantinople and then we know for a fact that she came to Greece and she again got involved with the Armenian refugees so in the case of the Armenians I think it's it's pretty straightforward now from this point on it really depended on on where the the NER was active and by that I mean that the NER as and also with the American Red Cross but especially the NER had a major role in all of in all of the country so therefore if we're talking about for example Athens and Piraeus then we're talking about the refugees who came with the first wave the violent wave of 1922 in the summer of 1922 so therefore we're talking about refugees from from the western coast of Asia Minor so Smyrni, Urla and the Bilaget of Aydin and so on if we're talking about the refugees who came from Eastern Thracian again we're talking about different populations so in a certain point to a certain extent I would say that it really depended on the entrance points of the refugees and the time they arrived it's a different story talking about the refugees coming in the summer of 1922 and it's a different story talking about the the populations who were exchanged in 1923 but also we should we should keep in mind that as it happened with with the refugee settlements you had mixed populations so you would have people from from Kapatosia but also you have people from the Pontus you have people from from Eonia and so on so therefore if if I take apart from the Armenians I would say that all cases are applicable. Okay Lina, thank you Dimitris. I would like to ask Marco if he he considers that there is something useful if we if we compare the case of Trieste and the case of the annexation of the Saloniki after the Balkan wars which was cut out from its hinterland and which was also a very important port in the Mediterranean and the conflicts that were created amongst Greeks and other populations and with the Serbs and the Bulgarians around the Saloniki do you think it would be a useful comparison? Thank you. Thank you very much Lina. I mean I can take this suggestion I mean I know just a few things about the the case of the Saloniki but I think that Trieste case can be usefully compared to other cases for instance I mean I recently written an article soon it will be published concerning comparison between Trieste and Gdansk after the First World War in terms of reconfiguration of relationships between port towns and imperial post imperial interlands especially on the economic ground but not only so I think that this comparison could be usefully applied to different cases and maybe maybe I think a comparison between another I mean with different Mediterranean ports and ports having trade connections between them could be really really interesting and I will try to I mean use this suggestion for the research. Thank you very much. Okay I've seen Gondas hand but before getting to her I would like to read the question of Fanagiotis Karagounis and I say hello to him because I think I know him he would like to ask another question to to you Dimitris and the question is about the relations between the Aeneir the nearest relief and other local Greek committees that organized and or distributed relief to refugees which are often represented I think he means in the literature and perhaps even in the historiography as useless or corrupted by some foreign humanitarians and he has a second question did you observe Dimitris and he disputes among the various ethnic groups the Armenians the Russians the Ottoman Greeks etc that were labeled as a homogeneous set of refugees and live together in Greece under the supervision of the nearest relief workers thank you right wow that's a good question okay so the first part the first part yes this is this is something very common that you see not only in the Aeneir reports but also in the reports of the Save the Children Fund from the Save the Children Fund that the locals are characterized as useless corrupted or they don't know what they're doing or they have no understanding of of the seriousness of the situation I would say that this is this is this is rather unfair and I think I come back to Rodogno's work now to David's work now that when he says that there was this kind of superiority approach from from these Western humanitarian organizations and I think this is why it's essential to in a sense bring to the surface the Greek side of that story and the Greek response yes people were unprepared and authorities and public services were unprepared to deal with this situation but we should also keep in mind that the people who implemented these policies eventually were locals yes of course the the the people coordinating with people from the Western humanitarian organizations but the people who implemented were locals and not only locals but they were also people from the Asia Minor group refugees for example I I had I had the opportunity to speak with a with a grandson of a person who was from Asia Minor and he told me that for seven years he worked for the NER and he due to the fact that he spoke Turkish was able to communicate with refugees the fact that was very difficult to do for the NER personnel so therefore I think that yes you find that you find that trend in in in the reports but at the same time I think that this is an unfair representation of of the local committees and and and the local workers who collaborated with with these humanitarian organizations now the second question um well again I have to to to to refer to David there's work about what he said that the the Western organizations perceived the refugees as a monolithic entity and and and and in a sense we should we should we should understand that the experience of the trauma of 1922 and and the that whole experience was different for it for each individual and for each group it's a different experience for the people who came in 1922 it's a different experience for the people who came in 1923 it was it was conditioned by the local origins the language and so on so therefore uh yes there are there were frictions there were frictions between the refugees as there were frictions between the refugees and the native Greeks but these were as far as I've seen from from the from the reports of of the Western Humanitarian organizations these were not reported what you see is that this group for the for the uh NER or the ARC or the SCF is uh is one group they do not really differentiate what they focus on is basically that they ratchet and they they live on the streets and so on but they do not go and also they have they mention the relations with the native population but not within they don't refer to frictions within uh the group of refugees as they see it just before turning the floor to gondola if I may add on this particular point that the nearest relief will have and I go back to Giorgos uh point on the myth of homogeneity of the nation the nearest relief had an extremely violent uh policy when it comes to Armenian in Greeks because they want to want they wanted to Hellenize these people they wanted the Armenians to to become perfect Greeks giving up their religion giving up the uh their language their culture to become perfect Greeks otherwise the only solution was for them to go to Soviet Armenia where they were notoriously were not very much inclined to uh to go and I had another parallel that came to my mind uh connecting just what you said Dimitris to something that Marco said just like the fascists would have never been ready to admit any connection or legacy intellectual political ideological with the uh Habsburg empire uh Western humanitarians would have never ever been ready to admit the role of local Greeks or the legacy or the Ottomans and their relief networks which were extremely sophisticated or even the role of local Armenian committees were so much better organized that the nearest relief and I turn my gaze to Laura in Lebanon in Syria and elsewhere so there is there is a story of concealing depth of gratitude that so many different actors very different actors and from the fascist to the nearest relief might have had with uh with with the past but in this 90 20 global 90 22 at moment uh this is the perfect moment to you know either to pretend or to try and do whatever they could to erase um and they do it sometimes successfully and sometimes not so successfully sorry for the digression gondaf too quick footnotes of course the Armenian issue is very complicated but but there's another historical factor in the making of the nearest relief and that is that there are very much there's very much an American missionary strand there and the American missionaries have been active in the eastern Mediterranean have tried Greece where they weren't too successful but they were very successful among the Armenians in fact they were probably most successful turning converting uh orthodox Armenians into evangelicals to what extent then is that the driving force for favoring army I mean the Armenians were left uh that not all they're they're not just Christians they are they are a group large numbers of them have massively converted to an evangelical type of Christianity that the missionary is promoted and then one other point about the Armenian sleeping for the soviet union and in 1946 or 1947 and I'm a little fuzzy on the date 17 000 left out of the port of Thessaloniki that's not exactly a reluctant exodus I would say that is a rather startling number so maybe we can comment on that too although I'm a little on the latter date I uh I can't immediately refer to to the most credible sources any comments on that Beatrice no you go first I think you are completely right kind of that that's exactly what it is I I beat so many of the nearest relief workers were abcfm missionaries and that's a fact they were you know the arm and the brain of the nearest relief and they spoke local languages and uh there are so many references in the archives of the abcfm of the contempt with which these missionaries slash nearest relief uh humanitarian workers look down at orthodox but even the clergy or orthodox Christians in general so they have a they had a very clear preference which is spelled out in so many words in very documents for the Armenians including and of course any attempt to convert orthodox to protestantism in its various forms was a disaster and these they know very well so there is this this is a reality and as to the second one I don't know much but I don't know if you're interested want to add a few words for the second one no but I think I know the hypothesis and I think I will I will try to uh combine what what what Wanda said with what you said WB4 is about concealing I think that the Armenians yes were like it was a kind of strange case in in in Greece and and they were treated as such like for decades nowadays and especially with like the past couple of days that I've been watching these documentaries about you know 1922 and the refugees and so on you see a descendants of Armenians who settled in Greece who actually speak openly about these Armenian community in Athens and about you know neighborhoods that were built around this kind of network of Armenian community network but for for a for a I would say a serious period of time this was not a really well known case with regards to the narrative of the refugees who came from Asia Minor which I think speaks volumes about what what you said David about Hellenization and also about what Wanda said about you know Armenian populations who were still in Greece even in the 1940s but I think it's a very interesting case to you know it's one of these cases that we do not really we have not studied in with regards to the narrative relating to the the refugees from Asia Minor of 1922. I'm on the lookout for the work of Merich Erol who yes he's doing that you're right you're absolutely right and I quickly want to add that even conversions to Evangelical Christianity and the Armenians didn't really survive the exodus for the US by the time they all congregate in Fresno or Los Angeles a whole lot of their walk back on their long orthodox routes so so conversion can be doesn't necessarily go very deep is what I'm saying. Right I've received marching orders from from our leader Maximo it's time to wrap up and to thank you all and to pass it over to Violetta and the colleagues Michel and Folger and so let me thank thank you all of you participants panelists for your wonderful questions and I turn it over I pass the button to Violetta thank you thank you see you later. Thank you very much for passing it to me thank you to all who presented in this panel it was a really interesting one and we're moving to the fourth session entitled Smyrna with two presentations and the first one is by Michel Toussaint who's going to talk about Smyrna 1922 and Michel is a professor of history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas she received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley she's a British historian by training and her teaching and scholarship engage the relationship between geopolitics culture and human rights she has published a number of monographs the British Empire and the Armenian genocide humanitarianism and imperial politics from Gladstone to Churchill very interestingly and appropriately Smyrna's ashes humanitarianism genocide and the birth of the Middle East and women making news gender and journalism in modern Britain currently she's working on a monograph and I suspect that much of what she's going to tell us today comes from that work and the title is The Last Treaty the Middle Eastern Front and the end of the First World War and currently she's also the Vice President and President-elect of the North American Conference on British Studies so Professor Michel Toussaint with Smyrna 1922 thank you Violetta can you hear me yes terrific well first I want to thank the organizers and thank you all for being here what is at the end of your day in the beginning of mine I will share my screen and then read a sort of shortened version of the presentation that I posted as a paper so let's see if this works so can you see this yes okay thank you Violetta okay let me start so as we know today we have two papers on Smyrna and others have mentioned that already today we know that Smyrna is open for reinterpretation and I'd like to offer I'd like to insert my my work into that dialogue about what Smyrna 1922 really means the fire clearly has a lot to say about the global in 1922 and I really have you appreciate the opportunity to be able to rethink the fire through that lens I'll use my time to focus on why I think Smyrna matters to understanding the end of World War one also show some photographs taken like this one here taken by a British sailor sailor present at Smyrna in 1922 and they were shared with me by his grandson and I'll share a little bit of my own archival material I really appreciated Demetrius's photographs so clear mine are a little more grainy but I thought they might offer some useful illustrations of what I'm going to talk about as Violetta said I am a British historian by training and I first encountered this story of Smyrna in the archives when I was writing Smyrna's ashes and in my initial reading the fire marked an endpoint for the history of British engagement with the Ottoman Empire that dated from the mid 19th century and in this narrative a little bit counter to what we've just been talking about with the evangelicals and the Americans what I found was that the British were very keen to connect to create a sort of kinship with Orthodox Christians they were supposed to be sort of connected with an Anglicanism and that we can see in Gladstone and so Smyrna for me was a sort of endpoint of that sort of long relationship that was created between British sensibilities and Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire so I'm revisiting the fire for this new book project that Violetta mentioned called The Last Treaty the end of World War One in the Middle East but I'd like to use a slightly different lens I really wanted to use Smyrna to help explain the final chapter of the Allied War with the Ottoman Empire without the story of Smyrna I argue we can't understand how the Great War ended so let me show you an image one of these set of images of Smyrna the Smyrna fire from the British battleship by day and by night and I particularly like that that last image on your far corner of Smyrna burning at night give you a sense of how long and how intensively this fire burned so what are the stakes of reading Smyrna as an endpoint of the war the conceit of my book project if there is one is to reimagine World War One looking backward from Luzon rather than Versailles what does the war look like if we consider that one of the endpoints I think it sharpens our focus on the war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in some important ways from the perspective of the Treaty of Luzon in which the burning of Smyrna I'll argue played a pivotal role the war unsurprisingly looks different than if we end with the signing of peace at Versailles but there are also important similarities war on what I'm calling the Middle Eastern Front mirrored what happened on the Western Front trench warfare the blurring of lines between battle and home front and the deployment of 19th century modes of diplomatic and military practice meant that World War One in the Middle East or close resemblance to the war in Western Europe at the same time the eventual extensive and successful deployment of Calvary versus trench warfare the genocide against the Armenians and a highly contested occupation by the Allies in the Ottoman Empire meant that the Middle Eastern Front had its own logic and deserves interrogation as a distinct and separate theater approaching World War One in this way extends the chronology of the war in order to better understand its global complexities like so many in this room and at this conference have done the work and this work builds on that on that premise and argue that World War One does have multiple rather than a single end point when it ended simply the fact is dependent on where you were Smyrna mattered as one of these end points and I'd like to discuss how it mattered in three ways the military the diplomatic and of course for refugees it altered the military course of the war that continued despite the signing of the armistice between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in 1918 because of the sheer drama of what of what happened in Smyrna in September 1922 it also shaped the diplomatic resolution of the war that ultimately produced the last treaty of World War One the treaty opens on and finally I'd argue that this this incident the burning of Smyrna lay bare the new reality that civilians now play a central war a central role in both war and peacemaking let me show you another slide these are images from the dock bordering the harbor in the aftermath of the fire showing the presence of you can see if you look closely of Allied and Ottoman military let me start with military considerations Smyrna marked the end of major military confrontations between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire that had continued unabated after the signing of the armistice in 1918 military conflicts included the Greek invasion of Smyrna and the subsequent recon conquests by the stop at Kamal's army as well as the Allied offenses in Solicia and southern Anatolia and the Allies that the Allies failed to reconstitute after two years of French occupation the maneuverings of Britain's so-called hush-hush army with the mission to check Russian ambitions and to win support of minority populations living in eastern Anatolia also took shape in this period this 1918 to 1922 period the powerful position of Kamal's nationalists on the heels of their victory over Greek forces meant that the Allies occupied a much weaker position than they had at the time of the armistice so though they're fighting they're occupying this weaker position as we know in some the Allies after 1918 continued to fight but did so from a much weaker position than before the signing of the armistice in October Smyrna's destruction ended the years of military maneuvering that characterized the post-armistice period the Allies stopped fighting after nationals from the city to the ground they realized that the 1918 armistice and the 1920 treaty treaty signed at Sabra with the Ottoman Empire could not and would not hold Smyrna large over the decision to abandon these earlier agreements the armistice in the Treaty of Sabra over the seven months of negotiations that was on where these agreements were revised in the immediate aftermath of the fire the entire Sabra agreement came under Smyrna and here I think the timing is important that it happened so closely to the opening of the Luzon Conference this included of course the minority treaty section the ending of the Allied occupation of Constantinople and freedom of the streets on the eve of the opening of the Luzon Conference one newspaper headline summed up the stakes and the Allied position Constantinople must not be allowed to be a second Smyrna it declared the burning of Smyrna also mattered to the diplomatic process Smyrna happened as a result of the inability to end the war on the Middle Eastern Front after 1918 the 1919 Greek invasion had emboldened Turkish nationalists who blocked the implementation first with the terms of the armistice and later the Treaty of Sabra the total devastation of the city and subsequent evacuation of the region indicated that the price of enforcing the peace negotiated first at Madras in October 1918 and then at Sabra in August 1920 I want to see these two connected obviously would be continuing the war that the Allies no longer wanted to fight September 1922 marked the lowest point in nearly four years of clumsy military and diplomatic maneuvering that failed to bring peace so I think Smyrna in this way symbolizes a less than heroic endpoint at least from the Allied perspective which is the perspective that this project takes to the diplomatic maneuverings of the war so Luzon happened in the immediate wake of the fire and its negotiations were indelibly marked by the near total destruction of the city anxiety apathy and confusion drove diplomacy at Luzon when the conference started in November 1922 Britain France and Italy resisted dedicating manpower to helping the Greeks continue to fight Kamala's forces after Madras and Sabra's leaving the Allies in a vulnerable spot war weariness contributed to the dilatory way in which the treaty negotiations proceeded Luzon was really two conferences the first physically presided over by Lord Kersen of course I have to show you a picture of Lord Kersen lasted from November 1922 until January 23 and it failed to resolve key issues resolving revolving around sovereignty and refugees Lord Kersen famously stormed out of the conference in January after issuing an ultimatum to Turkey to sign the treaty or risk ending the possibility of a settlement he consented to give negotiators one week beyond his original arbitrary deadline when threats failed to move the process forward Kersen called a cab and left with his delegation for London on the Orient Express the conference would not resume until later that spring and this time without Kersen British Prime Minister Lloyd George pictured here did not question Kersen on this point high commissioner Constantinople Sir Horace Rumble and his consular staff were charged with restarting negotiations when it finally came to signing the treaty at the end of 1923 Kersen did not bother even coming to Luzon the press depicted the treaty negotiations as a woman of no importance not there yet and and it was pictured in the daily in the daily express soon after the signing of the tree I'm sorry my image of my my woman of no importance is not not on my slide unfortunately but it was published in the daily express soon after the signing of the treaty and and what it pictures is it pictures a woman with a caged bird and the title is peace just arrived from Luzon one British diplomat called it a strange and little notice conclusion to the world's most largest and most destructive border date on peace in this cartoon in the daily express was depicted as a crying caged dub with a single olive branch held by a perplexed woman of no importance and this is how the treaty of Luzon was received back in Britain in 1923 so these are some perspectives of the destruction again of the city at the at the endpoint of after the fire so it leads me to my final point which is that Smyrna reveals the price of continued violence for civilians caught in the no man's land between war and peace and many of the papers conference are dealing with this and I think it's just a powerful reminder of how much this inability to resolve the war affected these these crises particularly for refugees the largest refugee crisis to date as we know continued in the wake of this of this fire and I think that we do need to understand civilians as a new kind of weapon of war and peacemaking this is a close-up image of what one American journalist called Smyrna's wall of humanity that's his caption there and here you can see the dock and you can see the people waiting somewhat hopelessly on this dock it's a powerful image of of what happened in the wake of course of the fire to people who had already been under pressure so the spectrum sectarian violence led to allied secret negotiations and hung over the attempts to negotiate peace from the beginning the allies decided that Greece is an orthodox christian nation should be should take over the christian dominated west coast of Anatolia on May 11th 1919 the allies secret dispatch from Paris outlining plans for the protection of Smyrna's christian inhabitants with quote and this is from Lord Balfour with a view to avoiding disasters and massacres of christians and its environs was allowed for the Greek occupation and this plan was actually put into action within 48 hours and I don't think we understand how the diplomacy here was was was constructed and it's important that we know that neither the Italian delegation nor the Turkish delegation were informed of the invasion plans and so these secret negotiations and diplomatic maneuverings I think really matter when we are trying to understand Smyrna what Smyrna represents. Lloyd George's support of the invasion had its had its core the belief that leaving the administration of christian minorities to Greeks would best serve the British national interests and here I have some images again these were taken these were taken by a British sailor who was was then called on there's a whole dramatic episode of why it becomes a rescue effort and and what the allies are actually up to there but I had I'm hoping to be able to play this this is a this is actually from a film that was taken of refugees from Smyrna by you can see the US the US sailors there and I thought it was a pretty dramatic representation of what's at stake here the diplomatic and military maneuvering made a bad refugee crisis worst for refugees at Smyrna like the ones I've just showed you shown to you it led to the attempt to impose nominal forms of nationhood on populations still living under the rules of a shape-shifting imperial order the so-called unmixing of populations an idea will be embraced by Lord Perzin at Lausanne proved an unworkable solution to the years of genocidal and inter-ethnic violence that plagued the wartime modern empire the attempt to make minority populations disappear through expulsion orders and internationally sanctioned population exchanges proved an enduring legacy of Smyrna was on with sanction these forms of removal and displacement such a move I argue would not have been imaginable in the same way before the fire I think what happened at Smyrna requires reassessing the Middle Eastern front and rethinking the chronology of the war itself the Treaty of Versailles ended the war for some for others the signing of the final piece of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 marked the war's official end and I would put these people in that category acknowledging the importance of the burning of Smyrna to this story reveals the military diplomatic and human complex flexities of the war such an approach has an important ramifications for the European historiography on the war which is where my work intersects or is is concerned with rather than leave the study of the post war post 1918 period to Ottoman specialists alone historians of Europe need to claim this as part of the wartime chronology the implication of this extended timeline matters beyond considerations of world war one itself Luzon paved the way for a modern internationalism that rejected empire in favor of the principles of national sovereignty this shift transformed the treatment of subject populations and regional politics as one historian has argued the violent reality of Luzon precedent had far reaching implications for thinking about population transfers in the Middle East well beyond 1948 it mattered also for domestic politics in Britain Lloyd George's so-called Greek disaster which is what they called the the the 1919 order really made him a voice in the wilderness of the liberal party and in fact it left the liberal party in permanent disarray making Lloyd George the last liberal prime minister and I don't think we can discount Smyrna in that episode I think it was a positive factor ignoring the Middle Eastern front means telling a less complete story of the war I think it's past time for European historians to take the events of 1922 and the consequences of tragedies like the burning of Smyrna seriously as a final chapter of the war and a harbinger of new post war realities thanks thank you very much Michelle that was really fascinating and we'll move on now to Dr. Volker Prott who is currently a senior lecturer in modern history at Aston University and he worked in the past in Germany you know Australia and he studied in Italy so a very moving about academic as we expect he has published a very interesting monograph his first monograph and the politics of self-determination remaking territories and national identities in Europe 1917 to 23 by Oxford University Press and he subsequently also published on a number of papers German history nation nations and nationalism and the historical journal the title of his paper is destroying the Paris order the fire of Smyrna as a global turning point the floor is yours many many thanks Violetta can everyone hear me just to check the okay that's fantastic yeah it's very good to be here I'd like to thank the organizers for for having me I should start with an apology that I wasn't able and won't be able to attend many sessions in this conference and I really have quite a stupid excuse which is that I'm actually on vacation in Spain so I'm spending most of the days on the beach you know far away from from ethnic violence hopefully and and all the the troubles of the present and and academia so please excuse me if I'm not really able or not let's say in the mental state to to to join many more sessions but nevertheless I wanted to use that opportunity to join you at least for this for this session because I think it's it is a very interesting and very important topic the topic of 1922 in particular the global 22 this is really what appealed to me let me just try to share my screen and see if this works so all right so can you can you see my screen is that working yes but if you can make focus on yeah that's perfect it's that it's that good all right okay perfect so I'm actually picking up a number of themes and issues that Michelle was talking about in a really interesting excellent paper that we just heard so I have a short historical background section that I think I might actually skip because she she did a much better job than than I could do for me the I came across Smyrna as part like Michelle studying the the first world war the end of the first world war more from an international perspective I was interested in the Greek-Turkish conflict the Greek-Turkish population exchange that followed the burning of Smyrna and the defeat of the Greek forces and I was really fascinating by fascinated by this old question who started the fire and it's obviously a question that's almost as old as the fire itself and as you know there are you know different camps some are blaming the Greeks and Armenians for having burned their own city others are blaming the the Turkish troops the Turkish forces irregulars and I probably won't find the ultimate answer to that question in this paper but I wanted to readdress this question because I think it takes us at the heart of the meaning of Smyrna not just in terms of the end of the first world war but to some extent also the beginning of the end of the interwar period or let's say the Paris peace system that followed the first world war so how does Smyrna sit in this global situation of 1922 and as Michelle said obviously the situation in 1922 is very different or the world in 1922 is very different from the world in 1919 and I think what we can say is that this Paris system what Eric White has called the Paris system so the peace order that followed the first world war that is durably transformed by the Smyrna fire and this is something that Eris Menela and others have studied as well is that the the principle of national self-determination that what the Wilson and the allies proclaimed as the main idea or you know the guiding principle of the peace conference that leads to a lot of frustration for you know for a variety of reasons and in some areas not in all areas but in some areas it leads to nationalist mobilization and violent revisionism and that's the the situation we have in the Greek-Turkish conflict the point I want to make about this global 1922 is that we do have if you like for well maybe that's taking a bit too far but I think for you know to some extent for the first time in history we have an international system based on ideas principles and on the premise of making international relations more democratic and this is an idea so this idea of national self-determination of arbitration that's if you like that that spans at least the whole of Europe and you know the the near colonial sphere to some extent but it really leads to very different outcomes depending on the region whether you're in Poland whether you're in Romania or in Germany or in Greece or Turkey so it really depends on the local circumstances and the fire of Smyrna and that's my main argument here is the first major if you like turning point when this Paris peace order fails and is actually revised by aggressive nationalism and that is a mechanism so that you have frustrated people with the new order and they feel cheated they feel shortchanged they want their own self-determination and they can't get it in peaceful ways or at least it appears to them and then they you know try to mobilize their own force and they use ethnic violence to create national cohesion but also to assert their nationhood and that is the fire of Smyrna is the first time I would say that this really works that this really happens and we can then of course see it happen towards the end of the 1920s in the early 1930s when you know Italian fascists and the Nazis and later Japan in a similar way you know using arguments of self-determination dismantle this Paris peace order and Smyrna also and I think Michel hinted at that at the end of her presentation it it creates this blueprint for not just nationalist mobilization and ethnic violence but you know on a larger scale this forced removal of populations as a way of resolving if you like or stabilizing the international system and that is the dark side of self-determination if you like however I would also say that the Smyrna fire and the conflict even between Greece and Turkey following the First World War was in no way inevitable in fact there were many different outcomes possible the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919 was to some extent the outcome of quite arbitrary circumstances at the Paris peace conference and a very skilled negotiation by the Greek delegation and several other factors and even the fire itself was not inevitable and the fire then had strong repercussions you know leading to the Luzon agreement leading creating this blueprint so my point is here that we do need to look at the Smyrna fire both on a micro level as historians using primary sources and then using this to place the Smyrna fire in a more global context now the historical background I'll be really brief so there have been talks between Greece and the Ottoman leaders the unturks about a population exchange you know into 1914 so just before the First World War started so these ideas do not come if you're like out of nowhere now as you know also been violent precedents in the Balkan wars and small scale population exchanges and then the Paris peace conference as I just mentioned the Greeks are able to secure a Greek zone around the town of Smyrna and get the Allied green light to send their fleet there in May 1919 and that automatically not maybe automatically but directly triggers Turkish nationalist mobilization as a response and that's really the beginning of the conflict yeah that's what I just mentioned and then the war it's not just a regular war and I think we shall also mention that you know it's it's it's affecting and incorporating civilians and in all sorts of ways the Greeks then lose Allied support are defeated in August 1922 and then we have the fire of Smyrna breaking out a few days after the Turkish troops arrive at the town of Smyrna now one of the one of the reasons why the Greeks are unable to secure their zone simply the geography but also the the demographic factor so now of course there is a strong Greek minority along the coastline of Asia Minor but there isn't really a clear border so you can see here the Greek claims of 1916 are really quite extensive they are then much more modest if you like at the Paris peace conference then the you know the Allies have their own ideas or you know well this is the this is the front line you can see here 1920-21 the Americans are the most hesitant they actually advise against any such Greek zone and then you can see the shaded zone here around Smyrna this is eventually the the area that's awarded more or less awarded to Greece in the Treaty of Severus so it's the geography that's really difficult and it in a way pulls the Greeks the Greek army into the hinterland in the attempt to pacify well if you want to use that word to pacify the the region and that you know in the process they are over stretching they lose British support and then they collapse now probably won't have the time to go through all these different points it looks really scary and complex but the the basic idea is quite simple so the point here is that we have this macro international idea of national self-determination and it plays out very differently according to different regional contexts if you like and in the case of Turkey or well the the late Ottoman Empire the you know Asia Minor we have a situation where you have mixed populations where you have an absence of really strong state authorities you have you know a long tradition of brigands or ethnic conflict if you like but also colonial western colonial meddling in this area so so there are a number of these factors that then lead to a situation where ethnic violence becomes the way that both sides use to mobilize nationalist support and in a way sorting out self-determination on the ground um and again of course we we we know this from other conflicts like in Bosnia in the 1990s if you think of the massacre of Srebrenn it's all these you know very often you've you've got these local dynamics of violence that you can't necessarily explain only by looking at the macro level but you need to look at the local level and here is where my my analysis of the Smyrna fire comes and in my argument here is that we do have the two stage outbreak so we can't really say who started the fire what we can say is that there were multiple fires starting at different points probably resulting from fighting between Armenian irregulars and and Turkish troops and then that's the first stage and as the as the fire start there is a moment when the at least the archival evidence that I have seen overwhelmingly points um points to the Turkish side of having deliberately spread this fire to the Greek Armenian at European parts of the city and you can see that here if you look at this is actually taken um from the British national archives a map drawn at the time indicate in the area that the fire destroyed and you can see that at at least according to this map quite neatly destroyed only the Greek the Armenian and the European part so again the argument is that you have this two stage right and two stage outbreak if you like with the fire the outbreak and then the spreading and the fire then becomes a means of cleansing quite literally this new Turkish nation state from its minorities and it's it's being used as a violent way which makes sense if you like which is facilitated by the broader framework of national self-determination where you know the the premium is put on homogenous nationally homogenous states so let me conclude how do we move then back from micro to macro and why is the smirna fire important so I would say there are two aspects here one is the smirna fire is ally peacemaking gone wrong so you've got this idea of self-determination that should the idea is to make international politics international relations more democratic to empower the people to choose their own nation in a way and it and it goes horribly wrong in not just in the Greek Turkish context but as you know in many other European regions as well but it's not just that but it you know because it escalates to this full-blown three-year war ending with you know the transfer of I think over 1.5 million people across the Aegean Sea because of that it becomes itself a driver for transformation of the international order in one way it establishes ethnic violence and forced population transfer so it establishes these ideas as acceptable means to revise and stabilize the international order and at the same time create this blueprint that I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation where you know both in times of ideas but also in very practical terms not just for the aggressive revisionist forces but as you can see at the end of the second work were also for the Allied side a way of resolving territorial conflicts of making sure to stabilize national borders by Michelle mentioned this infamous quote from Lord Curzon by unmixing populations and I would say that this marks if you like the if not the end of the first world war it's almost the beginning of the end of the peace that follow the first world war thank you very much thank you very much Volker these were two very interesting complementary presentations and as Mirna is so central in the Greek collective cultural memory with in history as well and it's very interesting to see it being central also at the global level and Michelle's paper I think has a very strong argument about looking offering a different periodization of the first world war and putting Smirna at the end of that war and so she urges and she convinces us I think that this is the time when the world war should be when the end of the world war one should be seen by the European historians of course for Greek historians at least that is the case indeed this is quite it's a question for Michelle and probably it comes from my own background of looking at the second world war and one of the things Michelle said is that the Smirna fire means really represents the end of Britain's ambitions to extend its influence in that region and I was wondering whether she has anything to say about church's ambition to occupy some of the Greek islands in 1943 well Greek yeah Greek islands Samos Leros and no one agreed with him but that was his little extra plan which of course failed and so we didn't see the continuation I would love to hear any comments on that and I very much liked Volcker's argument about the fire and how it started and well why it happened in the first place and it bypasses the really one-sided perspectives that we're used to and I think it will be picked up in many future works and it's this combination of micro and micro approaches that really seems very very fruitful and it shows how a fluid situation that could have end up in many different ways ends up in the concept of ethnic unmixing at the end again this is both presenters talk to us about the global ramifications of what happened in Smirna in the sense that you know this solution of the unmixing of population was implemented in the future in a way it allowed governments to implement it in the future and I would like to hear a couple of cases if you can present them where you know the unmixing of populations actually while it's happening probably by diplomats do they refer back to 1922 and Smirna do they make the explicit connection I think I'll leave it to that if you can respond and then we can take further questions would Michelle like to start sure excuse me thank you for that no I don't think it's the end of British ambitions are in and around Greece I think it I think it shifts in this sort of way I mean the British encourage the invasion they do I mean in many ways that are that echo today in how how the West encourages certain kinds of military actions by not getting their hands dirty while not getting their hands dirty so I don't think it's the end by any point by any point I think if in some ways it it creates a different kind of set of connections that that are remade in the post in the post war period what my break is is with the 19th century that Gladstone in liberalism is what is breaking in 22 that idea of those kinds of kinship connections I think we finally get the sort of death of that liberal ideal of vision in 22 not the military incursions I think it is remade in that moment so so absolutely I think there's a new way of thinking about Greece and thinking about Ottoman Christians I think and as the Orthodox Christians in particular there becomes a new one kind of way of thinking of that in the 20s and 30s as the refugee crisis gets worse so I think that's important someone in the chat had said asked about is it time at the end of Lloyd George I think absolutely we could have to think about we focus so much on that military disaster in the late September early October but I don't think we've understood the effects of what Smyrna represented in the breaking of that coalition of the disputes between person and Lloyd George and and I think that if we think about Smyrna as an endpoint not the endpoint of World War I want to be clear but as an endpoint we often we can actually then think about the diplomatic humanitarian together and I think that's really important to understand this war through those two I think complementary lenses and if we understand Smyrna and we've read it against military actions like Chanak I think we get a more complex view of what's going on at the end of this war and and why you could use a phrase like the unmixing of populations at a peace conference as as a guiding force right it's not simply you get this land you get this land but who gets the people like who's responsible for the people and I think that we have sort of missed that when we talk often about the end of the war and particularly in the Middle East we're doing much better job when we talk about the end of the war in Western Europe but for some reason we're reluctant to think about that connection between the civilian and the humanitarian and the military that comes together at the peace conferences so I think you're absolutely right I don't know about explicit connections people don't refer back to Smyrna I think in a lot of ways after 48 I think in a lot of ways Smyrna becomes this forgotten a chapter this forgotten story because it is such a tragedy except for of course in nationalist story-ographers like to breathe and I think that rediscovering and rethinking Smyrna and resituating I'm like both Smyrna and I are doing I think offers a wider lens and I think it's worth rethinking the war much as long as Western as historians of Western Europe at the end of the war have done in those same in the long those same veins I think it'll be really productive so thank you for those questions. Thank you very much for the answers Volker. I'm sorry I didn't catch your should I answer the same question so did you have a separate one there was just a short break in my connection I think. Okay I'm basically I think for you the question was whether the unmixing of populations that came with Smyrna is it mentioned in the future in specific case studies have you come across it being mentioned explicitly making the connection to it? I know that it has been mentioned and that it was used in in in in subsequent cases but as I haven't worked on you know the later 1920s and 1930s maybe some other people would be better placed I mean I know it played an important role later on in you know the 1940s and that you know this idea of moving populations rather than borders which for me really is the main difference between the first world war the settlements after the first world war and the settlements after the second world war I know that it that it is picked up as kind of a positive idea also in the sense of international law but I couldn't really you know kind of pinpoint and and I think yeah someone mentioned Matthew Frank's book yeah so I think I reference a couple of a couple of books in in in my paper that mention the you know that that as a blueprint but it I mean it would be really interesting actually as a research project to trace the impact of the Luzan agreement on international law on international politics and forced migration more generally and maybe some people have already done this and I'm not aware of it but yeah I mean it certainly played an important role yeah thank you very much and as you say Antonio Ferrara mentioned yes it is mentioned explicitly in a number of cases and the floor is open to um questions any questions so Michael you can guess that then yeah I'm doing the wrong I'm just with great interest to the two presentations not least because I have a book coming out in the next week about the the subject in fact it's a very old book I wrote it 50 years ago and but the publisher is doing a reprint and so it's a sort of tricked down memory leg and I learnt a lot from the two presentations because if I could just make one or two observations arising from first of all about Lloyd George and British side then I think we need to remember that from pretty early in this story Lloyd George's position and his coalition government were considerably weakened as compared with the time of the First World War so when the decision was made in May 1919 to authorize the Greeks to occupy Smyrna and its hinterland it already should have seemed to those who were following events that this was a dangerous decision and indeed it did seem so not least to the military advisors of Lloyd George and the American delegation and the French also so it wasn't that there weren't warnings because the world but they were ignored and if you look at the actual decision to let the Greeks loose on Asia Minor and Smyrna it was taken in the most amateurish and almost frivolous way by three men President Wilson, Colonel Sir Lloyd George taking advantage of the absence of the Italian Orlando who walked out of the Paris Peace Conference in a half because of the fume question and it was taken by the three remaining members of the Council of Four without I would say two consideration so in a way when you look at Smyrna as we have been and what happened in 1922 you need to look further back to see why it happened and to ask the question whether anything else could have been done you may even need to look back even further because it all started in 1915 with the offer of territorial compensation in Asia Minor by Sir Edward Gregg to Venezuela as Prime Minister at that time so that's just one not exactly brand of observation may I pick up on that or exactly should we move it a bit forward and at that time we're just stopping there was the offer of or rather discussion on Constantinople that Venezuela was kind of rejected right so at least on the Greek side there's an active discussion about you know why the Constantinople would make more sense yeah he is a loach to have said I'm the only Greek who could say no to Constantinople exactly as he did say yes he did he did and then we move on to the you know the kind of separate arguments for the population measurements et cetera may I just explore another way and thank you for both presentations excellent papers and I learned a lot I'm interested in questions and solutions national questions the way people frame solutions so as I'm sharing for you know so what's interesting to me and just to expand on some of the points made in the Greek space we have the end of I said you know overall we have the end of the eastern question we had a formal solution that comes into kind of bring an end to that and then there's a question in Britain I suppose we have an end what might I even of a certain sign of Victorian liberalism and liberty that takes us to the principle of fashionality but that also takes you back to Wilson because there's a lot of work basically I was reading a book about this that essentially we still bought some determination is according to this so we are in Victorian land territory so a turning point for Britain could be that another element I just want to throw in I don't have that specific I have wasn't a big question for for good but another element the principle of nationality takes me to you know yeah separate and mixed populations as a new instrument to protect them and this is what I would say if I correctly make heaven that it is a success story it becomes a success story in certain at least liberal circles liberal circles in Britain and elsewhere the population exchange what comes after the sun because it is seen as something that or as well as an if you may measure that nonetheless produces order and stability and I would argue that this is potentially the kind of objects of dynamics that we find in the 19th century before the war and even during the war when people think or observe the thing about Macedonia greed there are ideas that circulate in the local level micro level on how to resolve tension by disambigating populations essentially by moving populations there are ideas in the read about setting up banks in Asia Minor where they can spend this can actually you know go and they would have their you know carry that their welfare and so this is just a kind of a side of the document one other point and then the question for the math thing the other point and interesting transparency here is and I think there's a bit of work on that on how Zionists are looking into Macedonia and their settlement refugees there as an experience or an experiment in central Colombia is something that will potentially be of use in what happens in Palestine so I think that's another interesting dimension one can think of when we talk about this dynamics and the final question was specific question to focus if you I know you know it's a working progress so you probably may not have yet time to look into this I'm wondering if you have thoughts on depictions about you know Smyrna or you know from memory you know from Western Germans or others after the fire you know if that fits into the microscope you know how people write or those journalists of region about Smyrna the virus that makes sense so thanks so could the two presenters respond if they managed to hear the question because I could not very well I'll just see go ahead Volker you had a specific question I'll chime in later go ahead yeah I didn't I didn't get it I got maybe 50% of it but if someone could and you hear me now okay yeah more or less yeah oh okay so my question is if you come across when you're working with depictions of Smyrna after the fire you know kind of people writing about Smyrna that makes sense you know how do they yeah okay fine that was okay well I'll just say that I agree that the Victorians are a long time dying so they cast a very long shadow over the war and liberal ideals and I mean liberal with the capital L in the in that sense that you really do have to look I agree with the first question you do have to look backwards to understand to make any sense of this policy in 1919 which continues through to 23 you really have to understand what's going on with the eastern question under Gladstone in the in the 19th century so so yes I I appreciate that point and I think you're absolutely right I'd like to raise two points first is there is a great deal of discussion of Smyrna immediately it's Mustafa Kamal's economic conference and is here right away you don't have to wait very long and his conference is there just by the way to say that it's not just a British show it's a French and Italian show as well and what he wants to do is to say that he's not going to be a Bolshevik he's going to run a capitalist economy open to business on the part of British French and Italian banks especially French banks who are deeply embedded in the in the utilities and electricity and and transportation industries so there's there's an immediate discussion about Yizmir about Smyrna and which is fundamental and at the moment when Lozan breaks down what happens Mustafa Yizmet goes back to get the grand national status approval and he gives to Mustafa Kamal a later editor a present which is the wedding ring for his immediate marriage and it happens in Yizmir they're they're all talking about this is the end of the imperial moment in Anatolia so I think Yizmir is actually the beginning of something right away which is the construction of the position of the new republic of Turkey not even a better republic is coming without a caliph that's coming to where they put more Turkey positions itself between the western patras ours and Russia and so the Yizmir I think he is and when you put it in the way you did Professor Yizmir makes perfect sense as you would as a British historian but I think there are other games going on in which Yizmir Smyrna are very very clearly assembled right away that the war is over and to a degree the old imperial order cannot be cannot be revived and I think in some ways there's a there's a missing link excuse me can I interrupt you so that our speaker can give an answer and there are other questions and people who are waiting for those Michelle would you like to give an answer well if I understood what you were saying that seeing Smyrna or Yizmir as a beginning point I think that's brilliant of course yeah of course it is an end point because when you but what's so shocking is how much the imperial story that that you're talking about ending in 23 is so so animating throughout the war that these that this war of empires the Ottoman empire is not the sort of the sick man of Europe in this war they are a belligerent who sees that they are going to reconstruct a new kind of empire and they're all fighting all these empires the British and the French Empire are fighting over this territory and so this idea that you're reconstructing a a new secular Turkish state I think in some ways is a bit of window dressing because what's happening during the war is an attempt to reimagine an Ottoman empire in an age where empire itself has become rethought and you have to re jigger it you have the mandate system which kind of looks like empire but I think if we look at the Kamalists and what they're doing they aren't simply we can't take them at face value they're not simply reconstructing a a a a secular capitalist society that's not Bolshevik they are still inheritors of an of an imperial order that the British and the French are very much playing they're playing the very same game is my point so yes I think we can see it as a beginning point but we also have to see it within the context of a war between empires and that Kamal is speaking a language that is also very much an imperial language that the British and the French are appropriating they're all they're they're trying to reconstruct this new imperial order which ostensibly looks like nation building but still draws for its very cool at its very core this imperial idea that then becomes manifest in the mandate system and and I would even say the vestiges of the Ottoman empire are seen in Kamalist Republic as well but that goes beyond my my study but yeah that's absolutely right thank you thank you very so much Michelle next question is by Vesel and then we have a question by sorry by Panagiotis Karagounis and then by Zeynep go ahead thank you thank you for this wonderful panel which is very insightful and also the whole organization really honored to be here I don't know whether this will be a question exactly but I just wanted to bring in a couple of things to compliment that are compliment points that are made from the Turkish or Ottoman side and in itself you know this Ottoman slash Turkish needs a monograph with song you know regarding this ideological shift from 1919 to 1922 you know of course the shorthand reference to the let's say the guys in Ankara and their armies are the Turkish nationalists were were they or how many of them were to what degree what sort of Turkey they envisaged and the the the panelists of course had looked to this but I think it's really really fascinating to read the the parliamentary debates actually in Ankara and you know which sometimes roll around this identity and you know what is to come so I put this aside I mean that's something to discuss maybe later on and I agree with Professor Winter and Professor Tucson you know regarding this let's say war and we know that war you know makes nations for better or worse but also you know creates ideologies or shifts ideologies alters so I think that's something we see in Anatolia in many levels by the way so so that's one quick note and another note is I guess I wholeheartedly agree with you know the new chronology that we need to understand the first world war you know in Turkey it's the safar bellik the demobilization is 10 year war it never ended actually I mean and this is something we hear from all our elders of course it's not maybe something and I'm sure you have similar things the case for the Greeks you know who've been many of their soldiers have been under arms since the Balkan wars right I mean when when we you know when when the August 1922 comes so just one quick thing about the you know end of the war and the Ottoman responses and it's really fruitful to see actually check the internal communiques within the Ottoman state apparatus just after the signing of the mudros armistice the very nature of it it's a quick thing I mean it happens quickly Ralph Way who signs a newly appointed minister of navy of the Ottoman government signs it comes back gives a press conference in Istanbul just saying that we won't be seeing any allied troops in Istanbul just a day after the signing of maybe two saying you know this will be the best deal we could get also you know I sort of trust the British they are decent they are honorable enemies and well things work differently well this is one level but then you know you look at the communiques between the army commanders on the field Mustafa Kemal Ali San Sabiz who are holding the Iraqi and Syrian thought around this time they all allude to the this dreadful article seven right which says basically allies can occupy anywhere they see fit essentially and we sort of see well then the demobilization starts but then you know it really didn't start because again the actions of these officers I think my point here is that yes I mean the war really doesn't end in October and not immediately and I think we should also look what is happening before like 1922 and the diplomatic contacts and all the memorandas submitted by both Ankara and Istanbul governments actually which are not the same again during this time and maybe so the mudros I mentioned yeah and one last thing about you know this shift to empire to republic just to build on or you know compliment what professor Winters said about you know what's what's the significance of you know burning of Semirna and you know what is new to come awesome gündüz who was the chief of staff of the western front in the Turkish war of national liberation well independence whatever you name it Greek Turkish war he he remembers in his memoirs he recounts in his memoirs talking to a someone who is of his similar rank equal rank without giving any name saying oh now you know we retook ismir semirna now we can you know free the sultan free rebuild the Ottoman empire and awesome John gündüz just says like that's gone like Mustafa Kemal will not give that like we took ismir you're saying yourself so I hope this wasn't a long-winded comment thank you very much again and thank you more about these topics tomorrow thank you very much and I think we'll also like to go through Panayioti's question and then maybe our two presenters can give it an answer and thanks for the two interesting papers and he likes a doctor approach from macro to micro and vice versa regarding the micro level have both speakers seen any references to disruptions on micro geographers and everyday lives I mean the fire disrupted the special organization and everyday life of many people that lived in different mahala but in close proximity did they trace any emotions expressed even mediated by common people due to the fire of smirna what kind of perceptions of this natural disaster were emerged within the common people of smirna I pass on to Volker and michelle whereas I I didn't particularly study this aspect but I suppose it must have been really traumatic that that you know it's it's just I suppose what you what you would expect that this is a great tragedy for the people who lose family members and friends and lose their home essentially so but I wouldn't I wouldn't be able to comment on the on the geographical aspect thank you one of the things that's important to remember about smirna is that smirna felt protected the minorities there hadn't been touched during the Armenian genocide and during that I mean okay there maybe I'm overstating it but they certainly were not subjected to the deportations and to the kinds of pressures that other minorities were and there was a sense that some of the folks in smirna felt like they had kind of that that maybe this was going to be okay and the true tragedy of smirna I think in a lot of ways is that it is one of the most dramatic destructions of a multi-ethnic multi religious empire in this dramatic form because it had been happening in pockets during the genocide and during deportations from different areas but smirna itself was was was seen to have sort of escaped all of that it was a cosmopolitan it was a port city I mean it had a great trade it was really going to be the center of sort of renewal and so I think the tragedy of smirna also needs to be taken from that sort of what how how because refugees were coming into smirna for protection because it was seen as a safe place I shouldn't say refugees but but communities that could leave people who could leave mostly of a wealthier middle merchant class could leave and I really love this question because one of the things we can do and I think we should do is to listen to the refugee voices and map the I've been trying to map those voices literally map them on using smart GIS technologies and what is so amazing is to see how people respond to these strategies by moving to the next town and hoping they can go home and moving and the way refugee movement is really shaped by this hope that one day this war will be over they're not trying to leave the Ottoman Empire on their own accord but rather they're waiting for people to waiting for this to all calm down and just like the pogroms of the 19th century they're going to be able to go home and the true tragedy of smirna is it really says this is not your home anymore and I think for refugees who are forced to leave and who are watching and waiting the burning of smirna is that sort of you can't and when the expulsion order comes in 1930 for Christian minorities but they can't be in Ottoman Turk and can't be in Turkey anymore that's truly like the mark of what what smirna represented so I think it's really important we hear their stories because it does show us what that experience was like particularly for a community that had remained relatively untouched during the war the early part of the war thank you very much I think we have two more questions and I'd like to take them both and I would like everybody to be really concise say and then Laura Robson um actually mine also gonna be I'll try to be very brief I also have a four-year-old at home so it's very difficult to you know contribute um uh following is a very sad point actually um I'll also take a little bit from the Turkish Ottoman perspective actually there were previous examples of using fire as a way of removing um undesired populations 1916 Ankara fire was one of those and then especially impetus that was used very effectively from 1916 onwards um and I think here also the I mean I know that you know the the both papers they approach it from a different angle but the persona of um Nurettin Sakalli Nurettin Pasha who was seen as the person who I carried out this the last mission from the you know part of the independence movement actually was quite an interesting person who also who had just carried out a massacre against Pontic Greeks and the Kurds and and he was kind of an representing more pro-Ottoman and pro-Islamist clique within the within the in national movement but he was also um in a way um person that could do pretty radical stuff so in that respect I think thinking of these old you know arson you know this whole fire seminar fire is a very central event obviously is very important but I I think it's also can be helpful to put it it's within the precedence and how that had been actually quite effectively used at micro level and then eventually perhaps proved most fruitful in the case of Simirna so um thank you thank you very much Laura please can we have her question yeah um I so I have lots of thoughts about I'll keep it to one um which is but I think I would push back a little bit against this understanding of the end of the Paris order in Smyrna because actually I mean Smyrna is not even close to being the first example of ethnic expulsions in the interest of state building you know we have it through the Balkans the expulsion of Muslims from places like Serbia and Bulgaria in the 19th century which are also kind of you know undertaken under the umbrella of imperial politics and I would say that you know what Eric White's means by the Paris order is not just through replacement of empires with nation states but the acceptance of the practice of definite cleansing as a legitimate international form of state construction and that as in in those terms Smyrna is actually emblematic of the Paris order right which which goes to Jay's point about immediate immediate acceptance of the outcome of this of this event you know in 19 and before Lausanne right even before even before we have you know these renegotiation so I think that I think we really need to to understand that this is this is the beginning of the new era rather than the end of it and just very briefly as a side note reflecting something George said earlier I think when there are lots of examples of Lausanne in particular being used as a model for population exchange and deportations and expulsions later but I think the most important is the Zionist model which which draws explicitly on Lausanne's language for advocating for the expulsion of Palestinians from as early as the 1930s so I'll just go there's one more question here right I'm going to keep it very very quick um so being great you know like I was first exposed to the fires where I know we call it the age of my catastrophe which you know I read in a book I kept in which one that only Greece or even in Cyprus they acknowledge the fires as the age of my catastrophe and the western world they just call it the fire experience which I'd like to think that it's all because of the fact that it's very in the fires mirror really affected Greek identity and Greek nationalism and so part of that national identity was a face of great age of my catastrophe church or bed or Greeks or victims and that's what I expected I accepted um I wanted your opinion on just like this linguistic boundary or limitation of what this fires mirror meant for the Greece because in Turkish it's just fire of smear so in Turkish in the Turkish context and the English context the French context it's very much the fire of smear now whereas in Greece it's this catastrophic event just the destruction of a of a former Greek European Armenian center and I think we see that often in Greek history the way we refer to the empire on an occupation even the Pontic genocide the Greek genocide that's only something that we learn about in Greece in Cyprus whereas outside a woman especially Armenian genocide the Greek genocide until 1922 has a big mention which I think is also really interesting so I don't know how much of that is cultural bias of just Greek nationalism present in learning of Greek history or if it's just something that there's another reason for someone to have an answer or no comment thank you very much to all of you would Volker like to start and then Michelle yeah thank you very much really interesting comments and questions I've just been taking notes about the precedence of different fires I think that's very important so yes absolutely that is kind of embedded as I tried to mention at the beginning of my presentation it's embedded in the context of ethnic violence in fact the smear now fires already you know in in a way this technique had emerged have been developed in this conflict in in before so that is absolutely that's that's really important and I think it also points to the fact that we really need to look at the different sides right we need much more research so I speak neither Greek nor Turkish so I couldn't you know work with with with these materials unfortunately but I think it's very important that we you know that we bring together these different perspectives in order to overcome exactly these these these tensions these differences these different views that that were just mentioned on the on the point of Eric White's and ethnic cleansing as acceptable I think you know I mean at least for for for my part I completely agree I think that there isn't really actually a difference here but yeah I think the the the point is very important that you make about you know the immediate acceptance of the result of this of you know of this destruction of the city and the you know ethnic cleansing in this case that that is really new and yeah so I think that's that's a really important point so yeah I'll just leave it here and thank you so much for all your questions and comments thank you well these are great questions I think that one of the key overarching ideas that I've been hearing in this conversation is like how do we understand what have been considered national histories in the context of the end of world war one if we think of multiple endpoints for the Greeks of course the endpoint is going to look different the fire of Smirna the great catastrophe for Armenians are it's going to look different and and I think that's at the root of what this debate over chronology is is getting at so these are stories that have often been kept close in national histories and as one of my my Russian colleagues like to say the problem with British historians is that we think the war is only one story and it was begins and ends with the British view and when I started this project I really wanted to sort of think about what happens if we take this British view of diplomacy and humanitarianism an angle what becomes an Anglo-American view and pays attention to these other endpoints what are we missing when we tell a British story along this or a European story I should say on the arc of beginning and endpoints what happens when we insert the question of Smirna into the actual diplomatic process of Luzon yes it's there's a lot to be said for it it becoming a on the whites on the whites point it's not an end of the Paris system right but but there's also a way in which we need to understand these national stories that have become national stories within this globalized context of the war and these endpoints that we are looking at really can be sort of can can be embedded in a larger story and bear and and I think they they demand our attention to be able to understand why some of these crises that we have been reading as led by the British led by the French are influenced by different kinds of moments and this project is not meant to undo the idea that that that that there is that this is an endpoint of the 19th century I might have spoken to too strongly but but it really is to try to explore what is actually going on in that peace process that that that Versailles moment that is actually extended all the way to 23 if you look at the hundreds of conferences and and events that are going on in that period what does that that European style peace conference what what does that offer us to understanding the ending of a war that looks like no other and I think that there are lots of opportunities for beginnings and ends so I don't want to make the point that Smirna is the end of the war but it is an endpoint and it's one that deserves explanation and understanding within that that moment of of of making peace in that Lausanne moment and several moments so that's and maybe my goals are more modest than sort of undoing a thesis of that this is the the endpoint but but I do think that these incidents bear our attention and demand that we take them seriously as moments in the war that that influence outcomes and I think Smirna was one of those moments thank you ever so much for two very fascinating papers thank you to the audience for very interesting questions and I would like to finish by thanking the organizers for a fascinating conference I enjoyed very much this session thank you all very much thank you thank you very much for sharing our final session for today and we'll see you tomorrow we kick off at 11 British time with our first panel of the day tomorrow is conference in Armenia so we're moving on from Smirna there so thank you all for attending those of you the presenters and those assume and I'll see you all tomorrow same links